Zend Studio 7
Recently, version 7 of Zend Studio was released. Very unhappy with version 6, but previously satisfied with Zend 5.5, I decided to give it another chance to see if they had any luck improving the user experience.
Zend charges you $399 per year to use this software. They’ve got a standard toolkit for every php developer from phpunit support, documentation support, subversion support, code galleries, etc. These would be very useful if Zend had not gotten the user experience part all wrong. For $399 per year, they better have some great advantage over FREE competitors like NetBeans IDE.
Many of the problems that plagued the last version are problems with the base software (Eclipse), and will remain as long as they continue building upon this platform. Whoever decided to stray from the decent platform in version 5.5 and build 6 on Eclipse needs to explain their decision to their user community.
Eclipse is bulky, over-complicated, and most importantly it has horrible user experience for anyone other than Linux geeks. Building a professional, cross-platform product that costs several hundred per year on this platform was an awful mistake, which is clear in the titles you get when you search for “zend studio 6″.
The user interface has been cleaned up in version 7 so it feels more consistent with other programs. It’s download size is a massive 358MB, while NetBeans for PHP was roughly 25MB. Zend has improved the performance both in start up times and in memory usage.
The “clunkiness” of the application is better hidden, but the usability still suffers from almost every single complaint I had about version six. It seems that little has changed besides some the toolbar cleanup, code editing improvements, and performance.
This almost seems to be like Vista was to XP. Folks at Zend (and Microsoft) need to understand that you can’t make something this bad and convince people that it’s worth $399 per year. Not even $399 as a single, one-time price.
What’s worse is that with each new version, Zend adds more support for Zend products. I’m glad they support everything Zend – but what if users equally avoid/dislike other zend products? Why does Zend Studio only have built-in support for Zend Framework – what about cakephp, codeigniter, and others?
For those considering using Zend Studio, I would recommend against it unless you’re deeply tied to other Zend products (server, framework, etc).
NetBeans is completely free, and works just as well. While it has a few items I could complain about, it’s much better for my business.
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