I’ve been using different editors for PHP work over the years.  From Notepad, UltraEdit and PFE on Windows to Scite, QuantaPlus, Kate and others on Linux, most have never been more than glorified text editors.  Having earlier come from VB environments years before, it was a bit sparse to say the least.  The early Zend Studios were promising, but extremely slow for my tastes.  I’ve tried Komodo and Nusphere as well, but all were klunky, slow, or both.  Zend Studio has gotten better over the years, and we recently made the decision to purchase some Zend Studio licenses at work to get us all on the same page (I think there’s 4 of us that do some degree of PHP development, maybe 5 including people who only occasionally touch it).

I’d looked at Aptana earlier having found out about it last year and mentioned it on my webdevradio podcast.  It seemed promising as a javascript editor – hadn’t seen anything quite like it before.  I’d also heard about a PHP plugin for Eclipse (Aptana is Eclipse-based as well).  I’d tried the PHP plugin last year and it was extremely incomplete, in my view.  Well, on the Aptana boards this morning there were yet more requests for PHP support in Aptana (something that’s been going on since it was released!).  I read a post mentioning the PDT – PHP Developer Tool project for Eclipse.  Zend is contributing (or sponsoring?  I dunno) to that project, so I went to try it again.

It’s come quite a long way, and is usable.  I’m starting a new small demo project today as a testbed, and we’ll see how it goes.  The introspection for code complete is decently fast, the editor as a whole is also moderately quick, and I’m actually impressed.  Having seen so many mediocre attempts in the open source world at this task, I’m really impressed.  Time will tell if it takes over from Zend Studio for day to day usage.  Actually, if I recall correctly, I could swear that I’d read somewhere that Zend will be migrating their work over to the PDT project and abandoning their Zend Studio in the next year or so.  Darned if I can find any reports on that – it might have just been a suggestion from someone on a board someplace.  If they can add some more features to the Eclipse plugins, they’d have serious competition on their hands.  Making this available for netbeans would be even more attractive, at least to me, but it seems that at least for the short term Eclipse has more mindshare for plugin development.

If you’re doing PHP and looking for a cross-platform free tool for development, give the PDT project a try.

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