I was really pleased to see that Zend had taken the new approach with
pricing and availability of the Zend IDE, and that they were offering a demo
version of the product. I downloaded it right away and took it for a spin.
To be honest, I was pretty disappointed with the product. While the
debugging features look great, otherwise I think the Zend IDE barely
qualifies as an Integrated Development Environment. Aside from the debugger
and color coding, there's little offered here that I couldn't get in the
most basic of text editors.
The product I'm comparing the Zend IDE most to is Allaire's Homesite, which
we use as our primary code development tool. From an editor standpoint,
Homesite is simply a superior product.
Here are the major areas that I feel the Zend IDE falls short:
1) No FTP integration
This is a major blow to useability for me. Homesite offers nearly
seamless integration with FTP servers so they appear identical to local
files. Zend IDE doesn't appear to have any options for this at all.
2) No HTML or PHP shortcuts; lack of customizability?
Why can't I just highlight some text and hit CTRL+B to wrap <B> tags
around my selection? What about CTRL+P to insert a print ""; statement?
Or F5 to insert my own code snippet? Homesite allows us to assign any
keystroke to any tag, IDE command, or code snippet. We were able to dump
every single PHP fuction into Homesite as a code snippet, and can assign
common ones to whatever key strokes we desire. Zend IDE doesn't seem to
offer any such feature. This was a real disappointment.
3) No intergrated documentation (not even PHP documentation)
Homesite allows us to add our own HTML-formatted documentation. It
comes with extensive HTML and CFM documentation, and at least one kind
fellow converted an older set of the PHP docs to work with the Homesite help
system. To be honest, I was *shocked* that the Zend IDE didn't offer any
sort of integrated PHP documentation, let alone the ability to roll your
own.
4) No regular expression searching/replacing.
I use this feature frequently in Homesite, even when I'm not actually
doing development work. Not having it means I have to jump out of the IDE
to do certain kinds of search and replace work, which sorta defeats the
whole "Integrated" part of being an IDE.
5) Very little customization ability
I touched on this before, but want to reiterate it as its own issue.
Some basic keystroke and color coding customization is available, but all in
all the Zend IDE really compares poorly to Homesite - and from what I know,
most other popular text editors - in terms of customization.
6) Database accessSQL Query analyzer
This is something available in projects like KphpDev, and looks really,
really useful. I'm surprised this didn't make it into the Zend IDE, as so
much PHP development uses databases.
7) Price
Given the small featureset, I have trouble with the cost of the Zend
IDE -- over $100 for a client license. The debugger is great, but it's
nearly useless to me without a proper supporting set of tools. I might be
willing to pay $25 for this per client license.
Frankly, I don't think the Zend IDE is an IDE at all -- it's basically a
simple text editor with color coding that has an integrated debugger. I was
really expecting a lot more, given Zend's role in bringing PHP into the
"real world" of e-business.
I would like to say that I really admire what Zend is doing. I think you
guys are on the right track. We need the kinds of things you're
developing... but in terms of the IDE, we need a lot more to be convinced to
drop our current editors.
---------------
Ed Finkler
Supervisor of Web Development
Golden Dome Media
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
219-631-1107
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