Zend Develoment Environment 5.0 beta is a significant step up

today I downloaded Zend Development Environment 5.0 beta to give it a try. I've been using ZDE since version 3.0, and in fact developed all of PEAR 1.4 in ZDE. The server debugger has made it extremely easy to debug complex apps like PEAR_Frontend_Web that have multi-page interactions. It's also been good when trying to develop applications that run on linux and windows, and especially with debugging PEAR's unit tests.

I downloaded and installed ZDE 5.0 beta for windows on my windows XP laptop and it of course worked smoothly and imported options from ZDE 4.0.2 (which is still installed). The two versions co-exist except that project files opened in ZDE 5.0 are no longer accessible in ZDE 4.0, so be careful if you ever plan to use projects in both versions - it's not possible.

The first thing I noticed upon opening up the application is that it loads slightly faster, and the visual look is crisper, although these things don't matter to me much at all - it's the functionality that I need. Upon loading a PHP file, I noticed code folding, which works exactly as one would expect. More importantly, some of the pet peeves from ZDE 4.0 are fixed. For instance, when Ctrl-clicking on an include that is PEAR-style like

I often had to add the actual file to make ZDE smart enough to locate it. Now, it simply opens it. Also very good is a feature mentioned on Zeev's blog, which is the fact that code like:

will bring up auto-completion for the possible values of the PEAR_Registry object that is inside the PEAR_DependencyDB object that is inside $this. *Very* nice and much needed. phpDocumentor auto-completion of tags and auto-comment insertion of "* " also is a much-needed feature. In fact, ZDE has basically implemented that auto-completion that users of PHPEdit might be familiar with. I found this to be somewhat annoying in PHPEdit, but it can be easily disabled in the Preferences dialog of ZDE.

The new built-in help, although not as advanced as the .CHM files windows users are accustomed to, is a huge improvement over ZDE 4.0's use of the web browser for help, and is very fast. I think the version I am testing does not have completed help, as it looks a little raw, and some features are simply not documented, as far as I can tell, such as the new "Link to editor button" in the file inspector. In fact, I have no idea what that button does, as clicking it doesn't immediately change anything, or change the behavior I've come to expect from the inspector, perhaps someone at Zend can enlighten us .

All of the projects I am involved with use either ReST or ReST in favor of XML-RPC or SOAP, so I did not try the new WSDL generator, but it looks pretty nifty.

The addition of subversion and FTPS support is a necessity, and very nice, although it would be good if they would include a copy of ssh.exe for windows. I suspect it has something to do with the USA's stupid antiquated encryption laws, but this is not a huge impediment, I was able to get ssh-based cvs working with version 4.0.2 using the ssh that comes with PuTTY, and it uses ssh out of the box on linux.

Really, there is nothing about ZDE 5 that doesn't look better for the tasks I do every day. The built-in browser looks very useful. By far the most useful addition for me is the ability to look at output from running a script via F5 as html. I do a lot of work with PEAR_PackageFileManager, and since the built-in php executable is not CLI, it spits out htmlspecialchar()ed output, and I was always right-click-open-in-browser with output. Now, I can just click on the "HTML" tab and see what I need without starting a separate process. Very nice!

I'd recommend the beta to anyone brave, and certainly the new version to everyone if you can afford it.