NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul Reinheimer]

>          What was your order of preference?


I actually see them as hitting slightly different markets in my mind.

UltraEdit - A great editor, syntax highlighting, code folding, great
SFTP support (I'll still
put UltraEdit's SFTP support up against ZDE & Komodo any day). Worked great with
a lot of files, always fast, responsive. A couple nice smaller
features like the function
list for easy navigation.

Great Product for part time developers, students, hobbiests working
with a variety
of languages, or simply
maintaining a few small projects. Even after I converted
to ZDE, I still used UltraEdit for maintaining the websites I host for
friends and
family since the SFTP support was so much stronger, a task that has fallen
onto
Coda since my conversion to MacOS X.

Zend Development Environment - Good development environment. You pay for the

JVM, converting from a program as responsive
as UltraEdit this is something you
really feel. But once the app is up and your files are loaded you get very
aggressive
code completion, it's there all the time (still beats Komodo) with hints and
tips
trying to help you get your code out. Support for PHPDoc encourages
developers to
code
well, since it not only provides code completion, but parses it for improved
tool-tips when calling that function in the future. Some really slick
features like
code-completion on PHP5 Soap objects (this blew my mind the first time I saw
it).
CVS & SVN support is a bit weak, you're forced to choose one over the other
on
an application wide setting (rather than project).

Great product for developers who just do PHP, built in debugger(/php
install) is a bit
limited but works out of the box without any tweaking. I still use ZDE when
working
with code my students present for things like Indent Code and the Code
Analyzer
which finds tonnes of bugs in their code (and often mine).

Komodo - Good development environment. Not a Java app (no JVM!), but a...
different approach. The application was written in XUL, ontop of the firefox
codebase.
Which likely has a bunch of limitations and problems for the development
team, but
what it means for you as a developer is that you can extend & tweak the
entire
IDE to make it suit your needs with JavaScript & python. Add custom actions
to
the toolbar, right click context menu, whatever you need. You have access to
all
of Komodo's features via do commands, or you can code your own from scratch.
These
can be added on an either application or project level. Komodo uses XDebug
to
handle debugging, which (since it's a free product) can be installed for
free on any
of your servers, the Komodo application uses a custom php.ini to add the
apropriate
extension to your local php install for a (hopefully) painless local
run. Code completion
and syntax highlighting isn't limited to PHP, Komodo supports most dynamic
languages,
it also understands that a .php document isn't just PHP, it's a multi
language buffer and
you get full support for HTML, JS & PHP in that document (as well as full
DOM support).

Great Product for programmers who are able to deal with code completion
that's
not quite as good as Zend Studio, but enjoy the ability to extend their
environment,
or the power tools like RxToolkit or the HTTP Inspector (not just another
packet
sniffer).


So, apart from the fact that I use all three, and have all three installed
(paralells & bootcamp)
Komodo is my top choice, then ZDE, then UE (but UE doesn't really have a
prayer, I'm in the
wrong OS).



paul


-- 
Paul Reinheimer
Zend Certified Engineer
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