I have been a faithful Zend Studio user for about 2 years now, however i have started a new job and all the developers stand by Eclipse. I have been testing Eclipse, Komodo, Zend to compare the 3 and decide which would best suit my needs. This is not a full review on all of the IDE’s however only a review on the features that i require on a daily basis. I am going to start off by explaining my situation.
At work we have a sandbox environment setup so every developer can create a virtual web server for testing/debugging purposes. Every developer has thier own home directory which can be mounted as a virtual drive on our local systems. This is where all of our files reside. In order to mount that drive we must be connected to the VPN. I am evaluating IDE’s to see which will best suit this situation. Working with files on a remotely mounted drive is sometimes slow. Also loading the project files from this sometimes slow disk can be annoying.
Zend Studio
This is a very nice IDE, it is written in Java so it is cross platform. When you buy this IDE (Standard: $99, Professional: $299) it is a per computer license, which means if you put it on windows, you have to buy another license for your Mac or linux machine. This IDE i have found to be very nice, it is easy to use and the debugging capabilities are really good. This IDE (like others) allows you to debug locally or remotely. When this IDE first hit the market it was sluggish but they have since fixed that and it runs fast now. It has built in support for CVS/SVN however i am finding that it’s not the easiest to use, i cannot get it to checkout a certain branch for a repository (I am not saying it cannot be done, it’s just not easy like in other editors). I really like one feature this has and that is when you right click a directory/project directory, you can choose Find in Files, this will search all of the files for a string even if the file is not open. With Zend Studio you can edit files locally or you can create an FTP connection and edit files directly on the server. Zend has no problems what so ever when creating/opening a project that has 1000’s of files on a mounted virtual drive while connected to a VPN.
