Coding, some argue, is an art form. You try to achieve the best results with the most elegant codes you put together within the deadline. And those codes often go through different stages of metamorphosis as you gain more understanding and insight in the knowledge of coding… I don’t mean to get all “Zen” about this, but true geeks know what I am talking about.
And that’s how some people approach the kind of tools they choose to use doing what they do. I, for one, like the minimalistic and swiftness an all-purpose text editing tool like BBEdit offers. It’s light, fast and pretty powerful. And more importantly, it doesn’t screw up my codes like Dreamweaver probably would. But after having dealt with a couple of decent-size web developments, it’s become pretty evident that BBEdit is showing its weaknesses in areas like, for example, debugging, syntax auto-completion and project organization. So I started investigating using IDE to speed up development time and accuracy. I looked at and tested the following packages for Mac OSX:
Apple Xcode
Zend Studio
Eclipse (via PHP plugins: phpEclipse or PHP IDE for Eclipse)
ActiveState Komodo
I also checked out a couple of other simpler, not-quite-IDE, apps just for comparison’s sake against BBEdit:
PHP Studio
Smultron
For you Windows people, someone at IBM also did some homework for you…
Apple’s Xcode was pretty much out of the game as soon I started looking at the specs. There’s no debugging for PHP at all. PHP support stops at syntax coloring. Considering that the IDE is really meant for Macintosh desktop application development, there was no reason for me to pursue further… though I secretly wished it would just somehow magically work…
Next I tested Zend Studio along with Eclipse. Zend’s PHP debugger is very useful in catching even the most insignificant things like if a variable was declared but never used. It also supposedly comes with a “profiling” feature that tests which parts of my codes take the longest to execute so that I can perhaps write a more efficient code. But I never got that feature working. Even Zend’s own documentation and online forums are useless in solving the problem. Another very annoying thing Zend did was including features that are NOT supposed to work unless I paid for and installed Zend’s other products. Zend should at least have the courtesy to gray out those features. But instead, the company simply assumed that those products were already there and lets the user generate endless errors. There are other issues I ran into which made me feel that no one should have to pay for this software — it felt like a cheap beta.
Eclipse is an open source software which plenty of Java developers seem to love. Kyung first told me about Eclipse when he was using it. The setup was pretty straight forward and the debugger was also pretty nice, but its messages weren’t as contextual and as helpful as those in Zend Studio. But it was still a lot more helpful than PHP’s useless error messages. The only complaint I have about Eclipse is its performance on my aging PowerBook and lack of straight forward support for profiling (no graphics, just a bunch of tables).
Komodo is made by the same company that makes ActiveState Perl for Windows. It has by far the BEST user interface of all IDEs for Mac that I’ve tested, and it’s also most Mac-like. Unfortunately, it complained that my installation of PHP was bad (and won’t say why) and refused to work with it. And in order to get profiling to work, I’d have to install xDebug (which I did) and mess with a bunch of settings… It was pretty disappointing not getting Komodo to work.
PHP Studio and Smultron are pretty much like BBEdit except that PHP Studio has a more superior IDE-like code organization (like recognizing functions and classes that I’ve written within the same project and put them nicely in a side panel) which BBEdit doesn’t even come close to having. Unfortunately I could only work on one file at a time (no multiple tabs!). Smultron is pretty much a free version of BBEdit with a few things missing (which I don’t really care about). I probably wouldn’t have paid for BBEdit if I’d known about Smultron sooner….
So at the end, open source rules again. Come to think of it, I’d be pretty embarrassed if I were the project manager woking for Zend Studio or Komodo for making such awful products (though I should give Komodo the benefit of doubt since I couldn’t get it to work).
No wonder Apple ended up making its own IDE seeing that the mac programming IDE market is littered with such inferior alternatives. I wish someone would write an extension/plugin for Xcode and actually make it useful in coding web-based projects (PHP, Javascrit… etc). Maybe Xcode 3?