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Product Review: Zend Studio Neon Beta

So, a couple of days ago I got an e-mail from Zend about Zend Studio Neon and their free beta release. I decided sometime yesterday to give it a try. I realize that the new editor is basically a version of Eclipse with PDT installed. I also noticed some other changes such as the Welcome screen is customized for Zend. Nothing special here, but I got past that and into the editor itself.

Now, first let me explain how I use Zend Development Studio right now. Currently I use it for work and a couple of my own projects that all use a SVN backend. I don't have to check them out in ZDE to get SVN working with them, it automatically detects the .svn folders within my project and lets me use SVN functionality. I'm also able to start a new project and easily create it from a folder or group of folders that I select, as well as assign external dependancies to be included while editing. I use the function completion and method completion with classes because I have a horrible memory and cannot remember arguments for some functions I only use every now and then. Beyond that, I don't expect much from ZDE besides the occasional use of the debugger, which has helped me out a few times.

Now, opening Zend Studio Neon, I realize that the editor is still beta, and that it's completely new from ZDE as it's Eclipse with PDT. I remember trying PDT not long ago and wasn't very impressed at all. It seemed to lack a lot of the basic features that ZDE has. OK, so first thing I want, I want to use my existing files and still have SVN access. I have a lot of local changes right now that I don't feel like commiting to break the whole project, so I don't want to check it out fresh again. I start a new PHP Project, type in my project name and change the default directory to where my project currently exists. It creates the project files and opens the project. First thing I check is SVN, it's there and working right off the bat. The PHP Explorer shows my revision numbers and allows me to right click and access the "Team" menu just as Eclipse does. Great, now I know that SVN works fine by default.

Now, lets see how editing files goes... I open up my first file and start typing away. First thing I notice is that it's pointing out a couple of errors to me already. I was using a loop and not using all my variables in the loop, which means in my assignment, I forgot to include the array keys. That could have been bad... good catch! Also, while fixing this problem, I notice that variable completion works, which is no supprise, it also worked in PDT when I tested it. Now, I open another file and find it's got a few errors in it as well. Some things are notifying me of unused variables in methods for my XML parser, others are telling me of issues where I misspelled a variable and it thinks it's undefined. Great, fix the ones that can be fixed and move on.

Now I wanted to test the function/method completion. This is one thing about PDT I wasn't completely satisfied with, but it appears to work well in Zend Studio Neon Beta. I created a new method in a parent class, then in the child class that extends it I implemented the functionality. When I start typing $this-> it then pops up a window with all my methods in the class, including the ones in the parent and the one I just created. For those methods that have phpdoc comments, it also fills in the types for the arguments and return value. I write my method out and save, everything looks good and I'm deffinately enjoying this better than just Eclipse and PDT. Now, one thing I didn't mention earlier which I noticed while making changes and saving files.. in my PHP Explorer where it shows my SVN versions, on the files I've modified, there is now a > infront of them signifying that they're changed. I prefer the old style where the color changed, but I can deal with this too, and it might be customizable.

So far my experiance with Zend Studio Neon Beta has been pretty plesant. When I first installed it I had a couple of issues that were a bit confusing. I blame windows though, because after rebooting and opening it up again, everything seems to work as expected. Also, one other feature I didn't get to is the phpdoc strings. It works about the same as it did in ZDE wheren when you type /** and hit enter before a method, it inserts the doc tags as expected. I can say that I like it so far, especially the fact that they're using Eclipse. I've been a fan of Eclipse for a few months now because of how easy it is to install plugins. I've been using eclipse for Python and C within the past few montsh, and now I can use Zend Neon for PHP. I also checked the Help menu where you can access the Software Updates to install new plugins. This means that I can most likely add PyDev and CDT for my Python and C needs, great! For now it looks like I'm back down to one error instead of three.

I'll post more later if I find some other interesting features of Zend Neon or if I find any problems.