Earlier this week, Zend released their preview release of the plugin for the Eclipse editor, and several developers in the community are expressing their opinions on the matter. One such developer is Lukas Smith, who has posted two entries on his blog.

I was very happy to hear when Zend announced that they would join the Eclipse Foundation to facilitate the development of a core infrastructure for an open source PHP IDE. I have used Zend Studio to get around some of the limitations of my primary development environment Weaverslave. So I have high hopes for this open source effort. I just finished downloading and installing the preview though its too early to really comment on the experience.

The rest of the post is concerned with his views on the Eclipse project and how, with the help of Zend, they're making a solid open source PHP IDE. The second post deals more with his experiences with the editor, touching on specific likes/dislikes including syntax highlighting, general settings, and other performance-related issues.

Like I said yesterday I downloaded the IDE and played with it a bit. Note that its quite a hefty download if you go with the "all-in-one" package (so pick your mirror wisely!). But I kinda like software that you just unzip and go.

So again I see potential, so I just hope that the people involved make sure they do not forget about the open source development process along the way.