A couple weeks ago I spent some time setting up a “nice” Eclipse installation at home. My main goal was to get a good PHP development environment working. I’ve been using Eclipse for a while and, for PHP stuff, I’d been using a plugin called PHPEclipse (or something like that). I also had various CSS and JS plugins installed to help out with frontend stuff. It was passable but “eh”. As far as IDE’s go I hold IntelliJ IDEA as the benchmark. Its just good. What I want from an IDE is:
- obviously, syntax hilighting
- a good search mechanism
- a quick way to open files/resources in the project
- code completion
- quick docs
- a decent debugger
Nothing insane really - just standard stuff. My PHP environment covered some of that. Enough where I didn’t bother looking for an alternative for quite some time. The big missing components with my setup were “better” code assist (and docs) and the debugger. Anyways, long story short I wrangled some Eclipse plugins, some Zend extensions and got a pretty damn good environment set up. The core pieces are:
- Eclipse w/ WebTools
- The PDT (PHP Dev Tools) plugin
- Zend’s debugger extensions
The first time through it took me a little while to get everything to play nice but since then I helped everyone at work get things up and running in a matter of minutes (also set up my work box the same way). I’ll go through the setup some other time. Right now I’m redoing the whole thing on my home machine ’cause Eclipse has started to spontaneously crash. Its pretty random and is triggered by creating a new file, navigation code, switching to another editor etc… essentially shit you do all the time. So, while I re-download stuff I figured I’d vent.
Zend just released their IDE built on the PDT too. I’ll check that out some time. I never had a problem paying ~$500 for IntelliJ so if it kicks ass I’ll buy it. The previous Zend IDE just pissed me off 1,000 different ways - but since this one is Eclipse based maybe I’ll dig it and it won’t suck balls. I’d like to see how well it compares to the free route. Maybe I’ll do a write-up to compare em as well as go through how I got the free Eclipse stuff setup.
