Daniel Cousineau has posted a quick tip for Netbeans users that are working with the Zend Framework. The tip involves code completion support in your Zend_View instances.

If you’re using Zend Framework and NetBeans, you may be like me and bemoaning the lack of code completion in your Zend Views. As you may know, essentially what Zend_View does is includes your view within a method that belongs to a Zend_View object. This gives your view some nice variable encapsulation as well as access to the $this object (which is how Zend_View provides access to all the ViewHelpers and other functions). Unfortunately NetBeans can’t figures this out (such is the problem with static analysis on a dynamic language) without help.

Thanks to a tip from another site he found out that all it takes is a phpDocumentor addition to the top of the script to tell Netbeans what the file is. It links the current object ($this) to tell the IDE that it's a Zend_View instance.

In a recent post to the PHP-GTK Community site, there's a new presentation on code completion for PHP-GTK in Netbeans (illustrated here).

Jose Antonio Bayona Medina has put up a slideshow demonstrating how to use the basic technique outlined in this chapter to add PHP-GTK 2 autocompletion in Netbeans 6.7.

You can see the presentation in the post or head over to Slideshare and check out this and other presentations by Jose Antonio Bayona Medina about more PHP-GTK work and code completion.

On the Netbeans blog today, there's a new post that points to two articles about the IDE - one showing code completion in the Kohana framework and the other on completion in CodeIgniter.

How to achieve PHP code completion in Netbeans for the CodeIgniter, Kohana frameworks? See following articles:

Both articles come from the "My Beloved PHP" site:

• Netbeans: Code Completion for the Kohana Framework
• Netbeans revisited: Code Completion for Code-igniter - Part 1 & Part 2

Johannes Schluter has posted showing how the new version of Netbeans (with PHP support) offers SQL completion support.

NetBeans 6.5 is soon to be released. After 10 years of NetBeans that's the first version of Sun's OpenSource IDE featuring PHP support. While 6.5 is waiting to be packaged the development didn't stop and the first features for the successor, NetBeans.next, are already being developed. David Van Couvering just showed a preview of a cool new feature: SQL completion in PHP strings, if it does what the screenshot promises that's a damn great addition in my opinion.

Johannes includes the screenshot of it in action.

Amir Saied recently posted a handy little tool for the PEAR users out there - a bash script that handles tab completion for you.

Lately I've been playing alot with the PEAR CLI. The one annoying thing I noticed the most was its lack of tab completion that I'm used to from the shell. It turns out that this feature is very easy to add, in the bash at least.

It will finish off the PEAR commands for you and expand out the PEAR package names and discovered channels when it finds a match. You can download the package here.

They've already shown you how to get PHP-GTK code completion working in the Zend Studio IDE. In this new post they show you how to do the same with Eclipse running the PDT extension.

Enabling PHP-GTK2 code completion in Eclipse PDT for a project is very simple. The following example is given on Windows, but the steps should be the same on any supported platform

It's a simple eight step process (the steps are little) to get support working. You'll need to use the Gtk_Dumper to get the info the IDE will need for the completion.

The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted about enabling the code completion for Zend Studio to work with the PHP-GTK specific functionality.

Enabling PHP-GTK2 code completion in Zend Studio 5.5 for a project is very simple. The following example is given on Windows, but the steps should be the same on any supported platform.

Screenshots are also included in the step-by-step process. You'll need to run a bit of code to build the completion file, but after that it's just a few quick clicks away.

The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted some information (and some files) to help make your editor of choice a bit more "PHP-GTK aware" when it comes to code completion.

These IDEs are able to provide code completion not only for prebuilt extension code, but also for user-level PHP code. This gives us a way to provide it to PHP-GTK developers : all it takes is a "stub" file containing PHP declarations equivalent to the PHP-GTK2 classes, interfaces, and their methods and constants.

Making it by hand would be slow (and not efficient at all) so they opted to let the Reflection API do the heavy lifting for them and generate a Gtk_Dumper output file to hand to your editor and let it parse. The file is available for download.