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.

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Updated: 6/6/09: As of now, I’ve settled on NetBeans as my primary IDE, and Textmate as my secondary. Read below for reasons.

In my line of work, a code editing tool is something that you spend almost all of your day with. There are so many that I keep forgetting what I don’t like about each one, and I return to it six months later thinking it was decent. Here, I’m going to try to outline all of my complaints about each one.

If you’re a developer of any of these, please let me know what I can do to help you fix these problems, or please contact me to explain why I’m failing to see your genius. I’m certain that I’ve been through all of the big ones so if I’m missing one, please let me know.

In general, my must-have features are typically:

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Over the last seven years I’ve tried out almost every single tool available for my code editing work. I’ve tried open source tools, free tools, commercial applications, and they none of them meet my expectations.

I wanted to quickly mention the top three I’ve been able to use the longest and still document why they’re not what I want them to be.

Coda

I’ve tried out the excellent editor from Panic – it has two killer features: ftp upload buttons next to filenames that are stored locally and sharing via bonjour over the network. Coda is pretty basic and lightweight, but for hardcore php developer it lacks tools I find helpful.

I’ve heard that Coda is working on subversion integration which will be nice, but what I really need is improved php support. If they wanted to give me better code analysis, php variable/function exploring functions, syntax error highlighting, etc, I would enjoy it much more.

Coda is unlikely to every meet all of those expectations because it’s more of an everything editor and will probably never have specific language features like that.

Zend Studio 5

I’ve used this tool the most but there are a few items it lacks that I really would like to have. First off, while it can edit files over ftp directly, I would like it to have an ftp upload like Coda does. Zend 5 has no subversion support. I’m really driven crazy by some basic file quirks on Mac that I’ve been unable to resolve.

Zend 6 has a lot more features that would be very useful but unfortunately, it’s a worse program for me than Zend 5.

Zend 6

Immediately I’m shown how awful and clunky the new project/file management system is. There are too many ways to create and store projects. Many of the default ways now store my code somewhere I don’t want it, and confused the heck out of me when trying to edit files.

It also decided to keep all of these hidden files in my folders which had I left them would have been checked into my subversion repo. I immediately dismisses Komodo from Aptana because of this same issue – my project files were being stored in with my code.

I’m having similar problems with zend 6 on mac – files will not open properly when I just double click on them or right click and select “open with”.

Also, the preferences are a thousand times more confusing – I can change syntax colors in two or three different places for the same code type.

Why can’t anyone fix these issues? Who would release a tool that can’t properly open files? Why does Zend have to make a product that’s actually worse than it’s predecessor? I’ve tried a thousand others but I’ll keep looking. Any suggestions?

It’s been about two weeks since I returned from San Fran, as I attended the full ZendCon 2007. Most of the tutorials/sessions were enjoyable and most of them gave me some ideas for new methods as well as pointing new tools out to me. A few have already come in handy, like cvs2svn.

However, several of the presentations had very poor descriptions and were not exactly what I was expecting. A few sessions were essentially waste of time because the presenters simply read their slides and failed to show any useful examples. Those sessions were simply a very expensive blog post, and I’ll be discouraging any and all conferences I go to from allowing that.

I met several folks from various projects and I was able to give feedback about some of their items. I had lunch with a few guys from Zend, who were involved in developing the Zend Studio IDE.

I also got to play around with the next version of the Studio app, which in my opinion is not quite ready (although it was a Beta). This new version is based off of the Eclipse project.

However, the new Adobe FlexBuilder2 is also built on eclipse, so it may eventually be easier for me to move to more eclipse-based projects.

Now it’s time for me to re-read some of slides from those presentations and see if I can re-brew for any new information.

I’ll be attending the Zend PHP Conference this year. As usual I’ve planned out my schedule. I’m very excited for this as it’s geared toward what I do much more than Webvisions or OSCON of 2006.

October 07 2007
Depart: Portland, OR at 10:16 AM
Arrive: San Francisco, CA at 12:00 PM

October 12 2007
Depart: San Francisco, CA at 6:19 PM
Arrive: Portland, OR at 7:59 PM

We’ll be staying at the hotel which happens to be hosting the conference: Hyatt

My Conference Schedule

Monday, October 8

• 9:00 – 12:00: PHP Development Best Practices (1)
• 1:30 – 4:30: PHP Development Best Practices (2)

Tuesday, October 9

• 8:30 – 9:45: Zend Opening Keynote: Unlocking the Value
• 10:00 – 11:00: Enterprise PHP: Cross Section of a real Implementation
• 11:15 – 12:15: PayPal: New Solutions for PHP Developers
• 1:30 – 2:30: Keynote: Intelligence Emerging from the Internet Space
• 2:45 – 3:45: State of PHP Security
• 4:00 – 5:00: High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques
• 5:15 – 6:15: Working With Web Services
• 6:00 + : Exhibit Hall

Wednesday, October 10

• 8:30 – 9:30: Designing PHP Based RIAs for Richer Internet Experiences
• 9:45 – 10:45: PHP Features You Didn’t Know Existed
• 11:00 – 12:00: ?
• 1:30 – 2:30: Great Software
• 2:45 – 3:45: ?
• 4:00 – 5:00: Security 2.0
• 5:15 – 6:15: PHP & Agile Development Methodologies
• 6:00 + : Exhibit Hall
• 7:00- 8:00: Birds of a Feather Sessions (? possibly)

Thursday, October 11

• 8:30 – 9:30: Stay Free! How Open Source Affects Culture
• 9:45 – 10:45: PHP Migration Concepts
• 11:00 – 12:00: Monitoring & Managing PHP Applications
• 12:15 – 1:00: Closing Keynote

Seventy-percent of my work day is spent in a code editor. For years I tried out every single application listed until I finally discovered PSPad. One of the requirements I needed was a ‘save all’ option to save all currently open files, and the ability to search & replace in files – open files, or files in a directory.

Now, I have the problem of being split between two apps. For years I’ve also used Zend Studio, and now that I finally have a computer that can handle it’s resource requirements, I can’t decide which app to use. Zend Studio has amazing code completion, even completing classes/functions/variables from other places in the project. It increases productivity and dramatically reduces my trips to the php.net documentation to lookup the exact syntax of a function.

I’ve forced myself to use it exclusively for several weeks now and I’m finally getting used to it. PSPad had the ability to search and replace in files on disk, while Zend Studio only replaces text strings in open files. PSPad also had a toolbar button to toggle word-wrapping. When editing text I frequently need word-wrapping, but when I’m programming I usually turn it off. Zend allows me to toggle it, but only after getting to its location in the preference pane first.