Jeremy's Blog

I’m really starting to get disappointed in PHP IDEs. Because, I find one that works really well that I love (Zend Studio) but it falls short in respect of two things. The first being the lack of the ability to add support for other source control systems besides CVS and SVN. Second being the lack of built-in support for Unit Testing.

PDT (the Eclipse plugin) is very project-based. It offers up a lot of features that Zend Studio offers, with the added bonus of being built into Eclipse. And Eclipse has a plugin to support the Source Control System we use at work. Eclipse also has a plethora of other very useful plugins, like Aptana. PDT, unfortunately, offers no code inspection support for files outside of projects. That’s a bummer, because I have to jump in and out of various files in various locations that may or may not be apart of any project. So, PDT is missing ZDE staples, but has the benefit of being an Eclipse plugin, meaning I can have my source control integration.

Enter PHPEdit, which I’ve never used, but just learned that it’s going to solve the other problem, in an upcoming version. But not the first. I probably won’t use PHPEdit, except maybe to play around with, but the Unit Testing support is intriguing. If Zend Studio or PDT could get this in, that would be great. If Zend Studio could get this and alternate methods of adding source control support, that would be even better. I’m still waiting to see if PDT will be able to replace Zend Studio or not. Lately, I’ve been using them rather interchangeably, but I’m really wanting to move back to Zend Studio… Time will tell, but I wish these IDE developers would get it together.