It’s been a little quiet lately. This is because I am working on a cute little project that I will be able to present soon. More when the time is ready.
There has been rumor lately that Zend (developer of PHP) will release a PHP Framework. This is nothing new, there has been a IDE (Zend ) for a long time now. But it will be based on Eclipse.
Also Macromedia announced that their new Flex 2.0 environment (Flashbuilder) will be based on Eclispe.
Why on earth Eclipse?! I think this is the most slowest IDEs available. It’s based on Java which makes it incredibly slow already and it’s so blown up that it’s unbelievable.
I just can’t understand why developers would use such a tool. I am not willing to buy a GHz monster PC just to have an editor running there. That’s a pure waste of money and electricity. Emacs is kinda slow already but it runs on a few MHz.
Can anyone explain to me why to use such a monster?
I thought that maybe everything changed for the better by now and downloaded the whole thing. That’s 100MB already. This already shows how much memory it will consume. Ok, I still started it. It took more than 2 minutes on my Powerbook G4. Hello? The features it provides are so not worth that.
I can recommend TextMate (best completition) and EditPlus (best integrated (S)FTP). These are fast, neat text editors. That’s what I want.
Well, being Java doesn’t automatically make it bloated. Zend Studio is also written in Java, and its more than expedient enough for my needs.
I however, am not the worlds biggest Eclipse fan, but who knows, maybe with Zends input it can improve, at least for Zends purposes :)
– Davey
I’m not a huge fan of Eclipse either (I prefer jEdit for its simplicity), but I think one terrific reason to go with a java-based client for their project is cross-platform compatibility. I’m on a Mac here and wouldn’t be able to use EditPlus (or any other Windows only editors). Would you have been very happy had they chosen to go with TextMate (a Mac-only editor)? I think that Zend took the compromise on this one and decided to pick a cross-platform editor so that they could focus on getting the framework ready instead of worrying about catering to a single platform.
-Ian
I’ll agree with Ian. JEdit is good. I prefer it to EditPlus for many reasons, even though it’s a bit slower. Cross-platform availability is one of it’s main advantages. I guess that’s the reason Zend are going with Eclipse. I’ve used Zend Studio on and off since verison 2 and see why Zend needs to make this move. Instead of spending the resources developing their own environment and pretty much reinvent the weel that only works for PHP editing, they better focus on imporoving Eclipse. This is a Win-Win situation: Eclipse gets better because of Zend support and Zend gets to focus on PHP more. Plus, Zend Studio plain sucks. The usability suffers because these guys have to think in 3 languages at once: C/C++ for PHP development, PHP – just because, and Java for Zend Studio, then integrate them all and it’s still buggy. They’ll still have to focus on Java for the eclipse plugin, but they won’t have to think of things like “What happens then a user triple-clicks a line?” or “Should newlines be copied when you copy a line?” or “How do we improve SFTP support to handle keys instead of passwords?” – which all have nothing to do with PHP editing. Plus the developers get the benefits of other plugins and Zend won’t have to think about CSS syntax parsing, for example.
Alexander, you probably downloaded the full Eclipse SDK, which has the whole Java IDE and all the source code and plug-in developer’s documentation included. And download size doesn’t indicate memory size (given source, doc, etc.). A PHP-only IDE based on Eclipse will be much more lightweight by any measure. While PPC-based Macs are not speed demons (I own one so I should know) I know plenty of people who run Eclipse (the full Java IDE) on it and they seem reasonably happy with it.
Gonzalo, even a fully loaded Eclipse should run way faster on your setup. Feel free to post something over on one of the EclipseZone forums about your setup and experience and somebody should be able to help you find out what’s going on.
I must disagree here. Simple text editors slow down corporate development process. Even language-based code completion is not enough, good IDE must parse custom packages and make you forget function names and concentrate on application structure/flow. Being a PHP developer I must admit that no text editor/IDE gets even a mile close to Zend Studio. I’m happy that Zend is collaborating with Eclipse, this might have a great outcome afterwards.
I dont think that you could even make such comparison between a IDE an a Text editor with some highlightings.
it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to create a full scale (enterprise) projects with a mere text editor…
it would be a very time consuming and frustrating task to build the system and deal with classes.
I have noticed that alot of PHP developers tend to use these text editors… Im quite sure that with the making of OOP more dominant in the past few PHP releases (and the future framework by zend) a “bloated” IDE will become more popular by developers around.