Part 4: onto Zend Studio

Right, well I’ve finally got a large-ish PHP project to get to grips with. Proper PHP code to be written, and a local Linux server (”Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntulinux.org 5.04)to test it on (that’s why it’s been quiet recently - I’ve been struggling to get the server configured. GD causes PHP to segfault, but that’s another story).

Anyway, the experience has been going from bad to worse. Because of the price of Zend Studio I’ve not been testing that, although I will use it today. However, “PHPEdit”:http://www.phpedit.net is crashing randomly, and I’ve got a reproducible crash in “Maguma”:http://www.maguma.com. (Firefox also crashed yesterday when loading my dev page, but that’s another story). The tools are getting in the way of my work!

Whatever client I use, I don’t need built-in CVS support. I’m developing on Windows, and TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN integrate nicely with the file browsers in the tools.

OK, the way the others are behaving I’m driven to Zend. The first thing I found was that I couldn’t open the files I wanted to from a SAMBA’d drive, as the *File System Browser* or the *File -> Open* dialogue wouldn’t navigate any of my network places. In the end I opened up Windows Explorer and dragged and dropped the file, which was fine.

On “Norbert’s”:http://norbert.mocsnik.hu/blog/ suggestion I tried mapping the share to a drive letter, which worked fine.

H4. 3.47pm

This is bad, I’m really enjoying the Zend IDE Apart from the lack of code folding which I do miss, and that I haven’t figured out how to get insight into PEAR classes yet, it’s going well. There’s so much of it to learn and explore (I haven’t figured out if the PHPDoc comments can be auto-generated for example).

Certainly all the gripes about Zend Studio which Davey Shafik notes in “this post”:http://www.pixelated-dreams.com/archives/57-TruStudio-1.0RC1-Mini-Review.html are noticable, while the ones in his “mini-review of Zend studio 4.0beta”:http://www.pixelated-dreams.com/archives/60-Zend-Studio-4.0beta-Mini-Review.html I haven’t come across.

Update: reading “Norbert’s post”:http://norbert.mocsnik.hu/blog/archives/118-Zend-Development-Environment-4.0.0-beta-+-Zend-Studio-Server.html I see why code completion for PEAR isn’t working - I haven’t defined a project.