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I’ve started using Zend Studio for serious PHP work now. It’s a delight to work with The newest version, version 5, has none of the quirks and annoyances I experienced with previous versions and a slew of very useful features. For as long as I could remember, I was using basic text editors for the majority of my work and doing a lot of stuff by hand.

For example, debugging is a lot easier when you’ve got a tool that does it for you No more print_r()’ing arrays to see values or die()’ing at various points to see which logic paths were taken etc. Autocompletion is useful too, saves a bunch of typing. My favorite feature is Templates where you can define a block of code with certain variable sections. You can tab through each variable and change it, or accept a default value. Look to the screenshot I attached to this post, the second foreach block is demonstrating it. I first saw this in vidcast of Visual Studio 2005 over at channel9 and craved it. This is the second usable editor that I’ve seen implement it, and the first that has implemented it flawlessly.

Anyway, I just wanted to say I finally moved to a PHP IDE. Ermau will undoubtedly say “I told you so” But version 5 is much better then the previous versions I tried and could not work with. I’m glad I decided to try it, although it did come out all the way back in November of 2005 so I’m a bit late :p

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 3:17 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 3:12 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.