PHP IDE Trials: Zend Studio vs PHPed
Did a quick test of 2 PHP IDEs. I wanted to see if anything could be more productive than my current EasyPHP and XEmacs environment. It was partially motivated by the fact that XEmacs for Windows is broken at the moment.
The test was essentially whether I could download the tool and be productive in 20 minutes.
Zend Studio failed the test. I installed Zend Studio Server and then Zend Studio Client. I then tried to edit and debug my large PHP application. I couldn’t figure out where Zend Studio wanted the files to be and gave up after screwing around with it for an hour.
PHPed passed the test. The help file described how to set up debugging (drop a dll into the PHP extensions directory and edit the php.ini file) and I was able to debug code running in EasyPHP in about 5 minutes. The editor itself is a bit sluggish so I may end up editing in emacs and debugging in PHPed.
Update: XEmacs.org posted an installer for the latest version so that php-mode works again. I didn’t end up buying a license for PHPed since I’m such a cheap bastard and I’m really good at debugging code by inserting print statements…
ToDo: Look at PHP Eclipse