Well, now that Zend has released Zend Studio Neon, I’ve taken the time to download it and give it a try. I have to say, they’ve done a pretty decent job with it. The feature set is very robust and integration with the Zend debugger is very nice. It uses PDT plus some extras to provide excellent PHP IDE support. It’s got all the good stuff of Zend Studio and Eclipse combined in one. Out of the problems I noticed in the beta’s, most have been fixed, but there’s still a few lingering.

One issue is mainly an issue with Eclipse itself, there’s no way to convert spaces to tabs or vice-versa. There’s also no way to make it trim spaces on the end of lines. This is a feature that Zend Studio has had itself in previous versions. An easy fix to this is a plugin made by Andrei Loskutov called AnyEdit. It’s made for Eclipse itself, but since Zend Studio Neon is Eclipse, it installs easily using the directions provided on the page.

Another issue, which was really the show stopper for me, is that the building of the workspace will sometimes “freeze”. I say “freeze” because Neon continues to respond, however, you can no longer save any files, close the workspace, or close Neon itself. I must note that I only experianced this issue twice within the few weeks that I used it. It’s annoying enough of an issue that I don’t care to deal with it. Both times I had the problem was when I went to save a file and it wouldn’t save, therefore loosing the work I had just completed. I have noticed that sometimes it does take a while for the project to build the workspace, but I gave it plenty of time to continue each time and it did not make any progress.

Other than those two problems, Zend Studio Neon is a very solid PHP IDE. I haven’t gotten around to testing every little feature, but I enjoyed working with it and would reccomend it with caution. Be aware that there are still issues that I’m sure Zend is working on solving, but for the most part it’s a very stable editor. Happy PHPing!