Kevin Schroeder has come back around and has posted a new tutorial to his blog showing how to connect PDT to the Zend Developer Cloud (the "PHP Development Tools" extension for the Eclipse IDE).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a series of blog posts on how to connect to the Zend Developer cloud with various IDEs. Except one that I missed... PDT. The deployment plugin is already installed in PDT 3 and so you already will have the ability to push to the DevCloud instance.

The process is pretty simple thanks to that plugin - just create the project (or use an existing one), set up a new target for deployment then launch and deploy the PHP application directly. You can find out more about the "PHP Development Tools" on its Eclipse project site.

On the EchoDitto Labs blog there's a new post about getting Eclipse PDT with Zend Server Debugger on MAMP for Drupal (by Jeremy John).

Anything involving Eclipse is always epic. First, you have to get your head around what distribution of it to use, as confusing as one's first introduction to Linux distributions (there are different kinds of Linux?). Next, you have to grok the fact that the Zend Debugger must be installed on your server. In this case, MAMP. Then, you have to make Eclipse listen to the debugging information being outputted, on the debug port. Finally, you have to figure out how to use a debugger effectively (not in scope, but careful, debugging will blow your mind).

After following along with this screencast he was still getting errors when trying to debug (connection failed message). Eventually, though, he finally figured out the problem - an extra zend_extension call to load the XDebug module.

On Developer.com today there's a new article talking about some of the PHP-related improvements in the latest version of the PHP Development Tools (PDT) extension for Eclipse including template assistance and improved debugging.

Among the 39 projects included in Eclipse Helios is the PDT (PHP Developer Tools) 2.2 release. The PHP Eclipse project was first announced back in 2005, with version 1.0 coming in 2007. With the PDT 2.2 release, the project has continued to evolve with new features as the project's popularity has grown.

New features include a template content assist feature that will help make it easier for developers to get an application up and running quickly and better debugging support via a new inspection tool to help evaluate PHP expressions. The post also includes some quotes from Andi Gutmans of Zend on the progress PDT has made and some thoughts on one of its competitors, Netbeans.

Rob Allen has a new post today looking at using the Eclipse PDT editor with Zend Framework projects to make things like autocompletion and opening files/classes/methods.

I original wrote this as a comment on Victor Nicollet's blog, but I thought I should document it here too so that I can refer other people to the information. These are some tips and tricks when using PDT with Zend Framework that make my life easier.

His examples include the ability to use autocompletion with the Zend_Db component (with some docblock commenting) and the feature to let you open any file/class/method with the help of a few simple keystrokes. There's also a keystroke you can use to find the location of the file you're currently editing in the project's tree.

In a new post to his blog Klaus Graefensteiner takes a look at a quick way you can enforce your set of coding standards right inside of the Eclipse IDE with the PDT extension installed. It's not the easiest thing to do, but if you have a well-defined coding standard and know you'll be enforcing it strongly, this might be the way to go.

I recently came across a nice collection of coding standards that the developers at Gallery2.org are using. I especially liked the summary of settings for Eclipse PDT. I applied them to my Eclipse PDT development environment, took some screenshots and put this article together for my personal reference:

Settings he changes include some of the general editor settings (like tab width and margins) as well as PHP and source control specific settings to remove extensions the IDE doesn't need to worry about. He also mentions the "Code Templates" feature that allow you to get more specific and define the standards at the code level, not just the editor.

On the Geekzguru.net site there's a guide posted (from June 13th) about how to get PDT and Flash Builder to let you debug both sides of your application (the Flex side and PHP side) at the same time.

This setup allows you to edit and debug you PHP files along with your flex application in the same instance of eclipse. All features of PDT like PHP code coloring, auto complete will be available in addition to the wonderful features that Flash Builder 4 provides.

They walk you through the installation of the Eclipse PDT software, the XDebug module for debugging your PHP and how to modify your Flex project's files to modify the .project file's XML with a new linked resource.

On his blog today Piotr Walczyszyn has posted a tutorial on getting an Eclipse instance set up with the PHP development tools (PDT) and a Flash Builder plugin to get ready for developing Flex and PHP applications.

In this tutorial I will explain how to configure development environment to work with PHP and Flex projects in one tool. In order to do that I will use Eclipse PDT 2.1 (PHP Eclipse plugin), Flash Builder 4 Plug-in Beta 2 and latest Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers package which is eclipse-jee-galileo-SR1-macosx-carbon (of course if you are on Windows you should get proper version instead) at the moment. Additionally I will use MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack), of course there are other possible solutions like WampServer for Windows, multiplatform XAMPP or Zend Server.

He links to all of the downloads for you (much appreciated) and walks you through the installation complete with screenshots and configuration settings you'll need to get things integrated.

Ivo Jansch has a new blog post today looking at a method he's come up with to debug command-line PHP applications in Eclipse PDT with their needed parameters (not as a stand-alone script).

I write quite a lot of command line utilities in PHP and luckily PDT makes it easy to debug command line scripts. The thing with command line scripts is that often they require parameters passed on the command line, and PDT offers an easy way to pass them when you debug a script.

He quickly illustrates (with a few screenshots) how to get the debugger to prompt for the values of the PHP script you've selected. You can also use a similar technique in other Eclipse-based IDEs (like Zend Studio or Aptana).

As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone today, the group working on the Eclipse PDT extension has been working hard to get the tool ready for PHP 5.3 when its released and are now looking to the community to help them with some testing.

Roy Ganor explains in his blog:

Since Michael has just finished implementing the second phase for PHP 5.3 support in PDT, we can now expose unit tests and ask users to add more cases to the code assist tests repository.

His post includes the basic format for the tests (as written in pdtt, a clone of the phpt format) and a clip from the PDT wiki page about why they need them. There's no automatic way to submit them but if you want more information on the project and testing, you can always send them an email to find out more.

Davey Shafik has put together a list of four of the more popular PHP IDEs offered today - Zend Studio, Eclipse with the PDT extension, Komodo and NetBeans - and posted a comparison table of key features and preferences.

I have continued using Zend Studio 5.5 but have been looking for alternatives as it will not be updated to support new features like Namespaces, Closures and Traits. So far, I have tried Zend Studio for Eclipse/PDT, PHPEclipse (briefly), Komodo IDE and Netbeans. None of them have come close to replacing ZDE except for Netbeans. Below is some requirements and a comparison table for these I have tried so far.

He includes the specifications he's evaluating them on (including cross-platform with Windows, Linux and OS X) and the full list of "yes", "no" and "sort of" for each thing on the list. The criteria include:

• Inclusion of a debugger
• Inclusion of a profiler
• Auto-complete for user code and PHP functions
• Integration of revision control
• Project support
• Customizable interface