PhpStorm vs PhpEclipse
Good morning all,
I have been trying to do some research into the differences between PhpStorm and PhpEclipse. I am thinking of purchasing PhpStorm but not sure if I should since PhpEclipse is out there already. Could someone give me some input on the plus and minuses between PhpStorm and PhpEclipse? What does PhpStorm was to offer over PhpEclipse and vise versa so I could make an informed decision? I'm pretty new to both environments so any input would be much, greatly appreciated!!!
THank you all for your responses and input!!!!
Sam
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i heard alot of bad things bout eclipse when i was looking for a new IDE.. in terms of they tried making it as general as possible.. and as an afterthought dumped in php etc support.. eclipse is and probably always will be.. a java IDE.
im on phpstorm now.. bar that its actualy made in java... theres no faulting it (there are a few quircks)
one of the complaints bout php storm i do have :p its TOO powerfull... get the trial and check it out.. you get 45 days
I used to use phpeclipse. It is really cool. Its my second most prefered development environmnet. PhpStorm is #1.
PhpEclipse has been around for a while, longer than the officially supported plugin pdt which is contributed by the zend crew.
Personally of the 2 php eclips plugins I like phpeclipse more than pdt, but pdt does have the advantage of being able to do remote debugging with xdebug. at the time i was using it phpeclipse could not do _remote_ debugging with the xdebug debugger. but it could do it with local xdebug.
I have a resonably new machine, so the size of eclipse and the load times were neglagble. This is one big complaint that people who dont like eclipse seam to say. I never noticed it.
To get it to a working environment, Phpeclipse needs a few other extentions plugged into it. the smarty plugin to get smarty code highlighting, and the an ftp sync plugin. This is the one that i used for eclipse and really liked it:
http://www.jcraft.com/eclipse-sftp/
You could hit 'sync' and it would compare your local project folder with the one on the server and tell you what files are different. This is really helpful when there are 2 of you developing on the live server. Nice to know what your buddy changed while you were sleeping.
As for why PhpStorm is now my #1 is the error checking wins out. The context aware error checking in phpstorm is phenominal, better than i could have ever immagined.
There are many other cool features of phpstorm that i like too and stuff that im sure exists that i dont know about yet too, but i cant see myself going back to eclipse any time soon.
I have purchased a licence, but havent used it since im always running an EAP (which is the free pre beta build available here http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/WI/Web+IDE+EAP).
The ONE feature that eclipse does have over PhpStorm that im missing is that remote server 'sync.' But it is coming too. If you do choose phpstorm (and i think its a wise decision) Please vote for this item. Click the geen button at the top of the page to vote for it http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/WI-553?projectKey=WI&query=recursive+file+compare
Another great feature of PhpStorm is that its still being built and the developers actually do listen to what we say here and in the feature requests. So if you have features you think you would like to have, ask for them and there is a good chance that they will appear.
Hope thats useful.
PhpEclipse... Hmm.. Afaik the only available useful PHP IDE besides PHPStorm is Netbeans. I giving up with PHP on Eclipse based IDEs.
We were heavy users of Eclipse with PDT and some PHPEclipse. Next we moved to Zend Studio, which is a modified version of Eclipse with PDT, for about 2 years. The last year, Netbeans was our primary product, and we've been on PHPStorm for about 5 months. I have to say of all the products, none even compare with the power of the Inspector or the integration with CVS that PHPStorm has. Zend Studio was fairly decent at detecting major code errors, but it was slow and their support SUCKS. Netbeans rocks, no doubt it, but has little to no code checking ability for PHP.
The Eclipse framework itself is bulky and it's hard to determine all the packages needed to get the best out of the product.
We have Zend Studio, just upgraded it. The first thing I noticed when using PHP Storm was set up. Setting up Zend and going through all the options is a nightmare. There are 4 places to check for syntax coloring alone in Zend. Not to mention, setting up a dark color scheme is hella easier in PHPStorm.
I'll list a few other reasons we are chosing PHPStorm over Zend now:
1. The support. Good luck with Zend.
2. Way easier to modifiy PHPStorm to fit our needs.
3. The price. Zend is $299.00 Each! In fact, our cost to upgrade 1 copy of Studio 7 to 8 were higher higher than buying 1 brand new copy of PHPStorm.
4. JetBrains' development cycle is way faster than Zend.