Re: Semi-review of Zend-IDE 1.0

Ed, I won't argue with you about the necessity of these features in a modern IDE. All I can say is that this is just the initial version, and it came out with above-minimal set of features that make for a useful PHP development environment. There's no doubt that there is room for improvement, and I can assure you that our IDE team isn't sitting back and watching the sky right now. Most of the features you've mentioned, as well as others, are scheduled for the next non-bugfix release version of the IDE. Version 1.0 is hardly where things end. Look at the PHP version number :) Zeev At 01:01 3/2/2001, Ed Finkler wrote:

I was really pleased to see that Zend had taken the new approach with pricing and availability of the Zend IDE, and that they were offering a demo version of the product. I downloaded it right away and took it for a spin. To be honest, I was pretty disappointed with the product. While the debugging features look great, otherwise I think the Zend IDE barely qualifies as an Integrated Development Environment. Aside from the debugger and color coding, there's little offered here that I couldn't get in the most basic of text editors. The product I'm comparing the Zend IDE most to is Allaire's Homesite, which we use as our primary code development tool. From an editor standpoint, Homesite is simply a superior product.

Here are the major areas that I feel the Zend IDE falls short: 1) No FTP integration

    This is a major blow to useability for me.  Homesite offers nearly

seamless integration with FTP servers so they appear identical to local files. Zend IDE doesn't appear to have any options for this at all. 2) No HTML or PHP shortcuts; lack of customizability?

    Why can't I just highlight some text and hit CTRL+B to wrap <B> tags

around my selection? What about CTRL+P to insert a print ""; statement? Or F5 to insert my own code snippet? Homesite allows us to assign any keystroke to any tag, IDE command, or code snippet. We were able to dump every single PHP fuction into Homesite as a code snippet, and can assign common ones to whatever key strokes we desire. Zend IDE doesn't seem to offer any such feature. This was a real disappointment. 3) No intergrated documentation (not even PHP documentation)

    Homesite allows us to add our own HTML-formatted documentation.  It

comes with extensive HTML and CFM documentation, and at least one kind fellow converted an older set of the PHP docs to work with the Homesite help system. To be honest, I was *shocked* that the Zend IDE didn't offer any sort of integrated PHP documentation, let alone the ability to roll your own. 4) No regular expression searching/replacing.

    I use this feature frequently in Homesite, even when I'm not actually

doing development work. Not having it means I have to jump out of the IDE to do certain kinds of search and replace work, which sorta defeats the whole "Integrated" part of being an IDE. 5) Very little customization ability

    I touched on this before, but want to reiterate it as its own issue.

Some basic keystroke and color coding customization is available, but all in all the Zend IDE really compares poorly to Homesite - and from what I know, most other popular text editors - in terms of customization. 6) Database accessSQL Query analyzer

    This is something available in projects like KphpDev, and looks really,

really useful. I'm surprised this didn't make it into the Zend IDE, as so much PHP development uses databases. 7) Price

    Given the small featureset, I have trouble with the cost of the Zend

IDE -- over $100 for a client license. The debugger is great, but it's nearly useless to me without a proper supporting set of tools. I might be willing to pay $25 for this per client license. Frankly, I don't think the Zend IDE is an IDE at all -- it's basically a simple text editor with color coding that has an integrated debugger. I was really expecting a lot more, given Zend's role in bringing PHP into the "real world" of e-business. I would like to say that I really admire what Zend is doing. I think you guys are on the right track. We need the kinds of things you're developing... but in terms of the IDE, we need a lot more to be convinced to drop our current editors. --------------- Ed Finkler Supervisor of Web Development Golden Dome Media coj@goldendome.com 219-631-1107 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net

-- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO & co-founder, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/