[UPHPU] are you satisfied with programming?

[Fred Larsen]

On Mar 24, 2005, at 5:32 PM, Tierra wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:09:52 -0700, Kenneth Burgener 
> <kenneth at uvlug.org> wrote:
>> I love the PHP programming language.  My only complaint is I have yet 
>> to
>> find a good IDE to programming PHP within.  I like the feel of the
>> Visual Studio IDE, and how it will auto complete functions, syntax
>> highlighting, etc.  Now if I could just find something like that for
>> PHP, and preferably within my price range. (Free is a good price 
>> range :-)
>
> I hear Zend's IDE is as good to PHP as Visual Studio is to C++, in
> which case, it's definately worth it, unforunately I'm just barely
> short of the spare cash to throw down on a copy for personal use.
> Friends who use Zend at work have given it really good reviews though.
> It's definately something I really want to look into considering I
> currently use Visual Studio .NET at work with C++, and am very wary to
> try anything else with as nice as Visual Studio is.
>
> Bryan
>

I have been using Zend Studio full time for about a year and a half.  I 
use it all day at work and then at home into the night.  It is the 
first thing that I install on a new machine.

The code completion, syntax highlighting,  auto indentation,  bracket 
matching and real-time errors are all features that you would expect in 
an IDE and they work well in Studio.   Other features that I really 
like are:
    -Full PHP5 support
    -debugger (echo is good but you can't beat a real debugger)
    -profiler
    -SQL connectivity

The absolute best feature of version 4 is the smart goto source.  This 
is especially useful if you are doing any kind of work with some code 
that you did not write.  As you are going through the code and you find 
a function that you don't know what it does, you just press ctrl (cmd 
mac) and hover over the function call.  It will become a link that you 
can click on and it will open the file that the function is in and put 
you right at the start of the function.  Then you can press ctrl and 
left arrow and it will take you back to where you started.

I have been playing with eclipse and I know that it has most of the 
feature that i have listed.  The things that I would miss the most are 
the debugger and the profiler.  If you have not tried Zend Studio since 
version 3 you should give it another look.

I think that is would be a great use of time at the meetings to talk 
about our development processes.  Things like local vs remote 
development, cvs, testing, datebases, platforms, web server setup, php 
setup, etc.   Just some details about how we have our whole development 
environment setup.   I personally love to learn anything that can make 
things easier.

Fred