Omar Abdel-Wahab

Some long time ago, I decided to move from simple text editors (mine was Macromedia Dreamweaver) to an Integrated Development Environment, aka IDE. I have so far tried some good number of IDE's (or software that promises to be so) and text editors. The major problem with IDE is system resources, a normal IDE will kill your 256MBs Ram machine, a good one may not feel comfert with 512MBs of Ram dedicated to it! After spending some enough amount of time with each one, I think it's a good time to give credit when credit is due: Zend Studio: 8/10 Pros:

Autocomplete for PHP built-in functions and your own functions, variables in your current scope (this is a good one).

Syntax check on the fly.

Debugger (Zend Studio Server required)

Version control (CVS, SVN)

Database GUI integrated

Platform independant

Cons:

Very slow application (it was slow on my Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 512MBs of RAM running Windows XP and my Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 512MBs RAM running Ubuntu Linux)

Very expensive (prices vary from $100 to $600)

PHP Eclipse Pros:

Autocomplete for PHP built-in functions and your own functions, variables in your current scope (this is a good one).

Syntax check on the fly.

Debugger via a third party PHP extension.

Version control

Platform independant, though performance may vary.

It's not built only for PHP, Eclipse is a generic IDE, so you can enjoy putting all your projects to Eclipse.

Cons:

It was sort of a hassle to have Eclipse up and running with all PHP issues going fine.

No support for CSS, HTML as far as I am concerned. It allows for external editors for these files.

-- To be continued...