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Oct
10
Like Marc Gear, I also got the email from Zend this morning announcing the new Zend Studio beta, codenamed Neon and based on Eclipse (the open-source Java IDE originally created by IBM). I’ve been a Zend Studio Professional user for a couple of years and spend probably three-quarters of my computer time using the IDE so I’m very interested in the direction Zend are taking with the product.
I’m also a Mac user so I logged into Zend.com, downloaded the Universal binary (all 278MB) and fired it up. First impressions were that the interface is more refined than Zend Studio’s chunky Java widget set, but there is a performance hit - at least the first time it took considerably longer to get started than the current Zend Studio 5.5 (this is on my daily workhorse, an aging but reliable PowerBook G4).
The Eclipse workspace will be familiar to previous Zend Studio users with the file explorer at top left, class explorer/outline view below it, the main panel housing the file editor and a console/debug output in a horizontal bar below that. In the editor window itself code folding is enabled by default (good) but tabs were tabs (rather than spaces) so I opened the Preferences dialog to see what I could change. There are a huge number of options but it’s simple enough to navigate through them, and tabs were converted to double spaces in no time.
The editor view has some smooth aesthetic touches and the way it displays folded code (particularly phpDoc comments) is tidier than the old Zend Studio. The auto-complete popups seem a lot smoother - definitely more fluid than they used to be. The explorers on the left have too much padding for my liking though - with a few nested subdirectories in the file browser, or a long inheritance tree in the outline view, it doesn’t take long before you have to resize the divider (and decrease the size of the edit window) to see the names of files and methods. I wonder if this could be easily fixed but couldn’t find an option to change it.
The Code Analyzer conveniently notifies you about potential bugs in your code which sounds useful, but is annoying when you can’t figure it out how to ignore them on a case-by-case basis. I ended up going back into the preferences and instructing the Analyzer to ignore two “bugs” - one-line comments ending in PHP closing tags (which I use frequently to document conditionals in XML templates) and assignments in conditionals. That change required a project rebuild - 10 minutes with the poor PowerBook’s fan on full again.
My initial impression of Neon is good, although after 4 years I think it might nearly be time for a new Mac. I’ll continue to work with the beta and see how it fares with debugging and profiling later today.
[...] McGlinn has posted some of his thoughts on the recent announcement from Zend concerning the “open to the public” beta [...]
Thanks for the update, James. Does Neon have all of the extra, non-PHP components that the Eclipse PDT project comes with.
I realize that Eclipse was started as a Java IDE but the sheer weight of unrelated to PHP “stuff” that loads up with a standard Eclipse PDT install gets in the way of using it for PHP development. Is Neon better than PDT in this regard?
Also, get a new laptop! I’m in the same aged Mac boat and am hoping that the release of Leopard will be a good time to upgrade to the latest shiny MacBook Pro.
Hey boy, how do you do for config the extensions mysql and mysqli on the zend neon (call to undefined function error)?
sorry my english, I don’t speak very well.
Thanks.
Hey,
Nice review of the new Zend Studio! Looks interesting. I would imagine a dedicated Symfony environment built on top of Zend/PHP would probably be helpful, wonder if there is any work in this area
Jevon