I've been using Zend Studio for Eclipse (beta) for several weeks in a rewrite of a framework and numerous sites at work and overall I really like the IDE. Its got some great features and being based on the eclipse project makes it really extensible and customizable.

He happy overall with the IDE but has come across some bugs in his time developing in it (nine of them) with issues ranging from the SVN functionality and samba out to small syntax sorts of things (like the auto-formatting).

"Neon" is the code name for the Eclipse based version of Zend Studio. Yossi Leon, the Product Manager of the Development Tools in Zend Technologies, will go over the different features of Zend Studio Neon Beta, the key benefits of the Eclipse based product and the differences between the Neon and the PDT project. Yossi will also demonstrate the different capabilities of Neon and its integration with Zend Products.

The Webinar is being held tomorrow, December 12th at 9am PST and will last about an hour including the Q&A session at the end. Yossi Leon product manager for the IDE will be presenting and if you'd like to attend, you can register now and get your spot locked in.

The fix this time was a bit more cumbersome because the unpacking of files happens during the install not when you explicitly uncompress the tarball. However the Internet proved to be a valuable resource again as I found the fix from a blog by someone overseas.

The solution involved breaking the installer (pushing it to the background for a bit) at a certain point, executing a command to replace the variable name and resuming the install process to complete a correct software installation.

On a regular basis, Zend hosts free Webinars on a variety of Zend and PHP related topics. They keep a lost of them over at the Zend site but occasionally, I like to list them here to make sure all DevZone readers are aware of them.

The list includes:

• Zend Studio Neon Beta Overview (Oct 17)
• PHP4 to PHP5 Migration (Oct 24)
• Zend Framework Database Access (Oct 31)
• Improve your PHP Application's Search Capabilities with Lucene (Nov 7)
• Building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with PHP and Zend Framework (Nov 14)
• PHP Security Basics (Nov 28)

Both the pages for each of the webinars and the Zend Developer Zone post have summaries of what each is about.

First impressions were that the interface is more refined than Zend Studio's chunky Java widget set, but there is a performance hit - at least the first time it took considerably longer to get started than the current Zend Studio 5.5 (this is on my daily workhorse, an aging but reliable PowerBook G4).

He talks about the workspace setup (Eclipse is familiar to most), how the editor flows, features it includes - like code folding and auto-complete - and the Code Analyzer feature that helps you keep track of potential bugs in your code.