Who So

I have been testing out quite a few Integrated development environment applications, also known as IDE, to be used to develop websites in PHP. These are the ones that I’ve tried:

• Komodo
• Aptana
• Eclipse / With Aptana “plugin”
• Netbeans
• Round up

Komodo

This IDE is created by Active State and in their commercial text they write: «Code smarter and faster with Komodo IDE 5, the award-winning professional development environment for dynamic languages and open technologies.»
You maybe code smarter, but faster? I found the autocompletion in Komodo slow – at least for PHP which is the only language I have used it for.
Also: It was impossible to create a new Subversion repository for the project you were working on. The whole Subversion deal was one of the reasons for me to stop using this IDE – which I have paid $295 for since I liked it in the beginning.
I also became annoyed of the things disappearing when I started up the IDE. I have reported this to Active State and it seamed to be related to the HTML-renderer of that first page.
For the price of this IDE I am also expecting more. I would expect it to be able to do drag’n drop web development, but Active State has no plans on implementing such a feature.
Yes. I have asked.
Last thing: The application is still in version 5.2 and has been so for quite some time. And I don’t know if development has continued.
Up

Aptana Studio

Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse and I started to like this one in the beginning. I also paid $99 for the license for this software.
Six months later Aptana INC decided to let the application be free – and the only things you’ve really had paid for was SFTP-support.
That annoyed me so much that I decided to remove it. Also: Auto completion in this application wasn’t as good as I expected.
Overall an OK IDE, but I think it’s to much to call it a Studio.
Up

Eclipse

I decided to use Eclipse after it became available in the Ubuntu Repo, and after som intallation of needed packages I can now do PHP development in the IDE. Since Aptana is based on Eclipse I didn’t expect any big surprises and I didn’t get any either.
I did how ever hope that the Code complete that comes with the PHP Development Package would speed things up. Nope. It could be that my Dell D420 is not as powerful as it should for these types of applications.
Up

Netbeans

I tried Netbeans from Sun (now Oracle?) after I saw a videocast from Zend where one of the developers used the IDE. It seemed as if Codecomplete was fast, which it might be, but I didn’t find it as fast as I want it to. Nor was it stable. Sometimes code complete worked, and sometimes not.

I didn’t use it as long, and it has been a while since I tried it, and so I don’t remember if it had SVN support or how it worked. Maybe I should install it again.

I got a suggestion that I should try the latest 6.8 version, and so I have. And NO, I don’t like Netbeans. Word Wrap is lacking, and dialogs are not native. Also some of the fields in dialogs are way to small.
Up

Round up

I don’t want to conclude here. All IDEs works and does their job as expected. Codecomplete is a feature I am a big fan of, and sometimes it worked in these applications, sometimes not.
It could be reasons for this, and so I shall dig through my code and see why it happens. Maybe start with a clean application just to see how things are working.
I’ve written it before, and I’ll write it again. All IDEs must step it up a notch. The future is in building websites in WYSIWYG then adding advanced code like PHP, Perl, Ruby or Python. That way designers and developers can work hand in hand.

It’s the idea behind Visual Studio – an application that lives up to the word Studio – not like Aptana Studio.
Of the ones available as Linux tools, Eclipse is the one that has the greatest potential. Not only can you code in almost any of the languages available, but you can also create Android applications.
It’s quite an impressive piece of software.

I know that Zend Studio is now based on Eclipse, and I hope that with the Zend Framework it can be possible to start doing Drag’n drop development in Eclipse / ZS.
With a price tag of whooping $575 (Euro 399) Drag’n Drop is a feature I very much expect to see. It’s the most expencive IDEs of them all out there, so it should stand out more than it does at the moment.

I hope to see that in the future, maybe even in 2010 although that is a bit optimistic.