Recently Chad Kieffer made a post to his blog about a handy little feature of the Eclipse IDE that can help you speed up your development - snippets and templatings.

You already know that Eclipse PDT provides autocompletion and hints for PHP's built in functions. In addition, commenting your code with PHPDoc adds autocompletion and hinting for your application's classes, methods, and variables. If you haven't already discovered, Eclipse PDT also provides autocompletion of PHP's control structures, class definitions, and methods through code templates.

He gives examples of both the templating and the snippets - inserting a switch() statement template and how to create a custom snippet of whatever code you choose.

For the Eclipse PHP developers out there anxiously awaiting the next major release of the extension, you'll have to wait just a bit longer. Max Horvath mentions a few of the reasons why:

As expected by many, Eclipse PDT's next major release has been postponed. While two milestones couldn't be released, it became clearer and clearer that the release date of September 15th 2008 couldn't be met.

The new deadline has been set though - December 29th, 2008. New improvements in this release will include a type hierarchy view, new PHP explorer functionality, code templates and a code assist for dynamic variables. There was also a large change to the API that set things back a bit.

Max Horvath has called for some help in getting a feature included (and fully working) into the next release of the Eclipse PDT extension - phar support.

With Eclipse PDT 2.0 to be released in September (or October) support for namespaces is already on the roadmap. Support for Phar archives has not been listed, yet. But in my opinion Eclipse PDT 2.0 must support handling Phar archives when PHP 5.3 will hit the street.

He points out some of the current lackings that the Eclipse extension has including the inability to browse phar archives and that there is no way to debug the archives. He's opened a feature request for the functonality to be added and suggested fleshing it out on the wiki.

This is where you come in - he wants to know what sort of support that developers out there would like for phar in this next release. Just leave comments on his blog with your ideas.

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 IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial (login required) showing how to use the Eclipse PDT functionality to debug scripts your PHP development.

The PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in, when installed with Eclipse Europa, gives you that ability to quickly write and debug PHP scripts and pages. PDT supports two debugging tools: XDebug and the Zend Debugger. Learn how to configure PDT for debugging PHP scripts and discover which perspectives you use when taking closer looks at your scripts.

You'll need to have a machine with PHP, Eclipse, Apache and the PHP Development Tools already installed to follow along (as well as a trial version of the Zend Studio Web Debugger). They also include the methods for setting up XDebug as the debugger.

Roy Ganor-Shwaartz has blogged about an upcoming event that's an effort to "help foster community outreach and growth" around the Eclipse PDT project - Eclipse PDT Bug Day (May 30th).

Since there are more and more people in the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) community that start asking for diversity in the development side, Nick Boldt has suggested to help out and contribute patches to the project "if there's Zend folks willing to coach me...". Actually, I am very excited from his (and others) proposal, since it's the first time a group of people have stated that they want to contribute to PDT.

The event will happen on May 30th, 2008 and an effort will be made to squash as many from this list as possible (as well as potential others that might be found along the way). You can get more information about how to participate and help out the PDT project on this page on the Eclipse site.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the fourth part (or a five part series) from Stefan Priebsch about testing and debugging your applications with XDebug.

Welcome to the fourth installment in our five-part series of xdebug articles on the Zend DevZone. This week, we will explore debugging PHP code with xdebug, the swiss army knife for PHP developers. [...] This fall, the problem of having no release-quality cross-platform xdebug client has been solved with the release of Eclipse PDT. Eclipse PDT is a free IDE for PHP supporting xdebug out of the box. So, without further ado, let us install Eclipse PDT to get started with debugging.

He includes the setup procedure for getting XDebug and the Eclipse PDT extension to play nice together (including some screenshots of example output).

Roy Ganor-Shwaartz submitted a new blog entry he's made talking about the integration of PDT and Smarty:

PDT was built only as a "PHP Development Tools framework". In the PHP world where there are hundreds of core extensions and dozens of frameworks it is impossible to support all of them.

But... a feature request is a feature request. And feature requests are meant to be resolved. Applying simple logic rules derives that - "PDT Gets Smarty".

His post both links to and gives an example of their integration. All it takes is downloading a single package and installing it into Eclipse. Check out the project's Googlecode page for more information.

The Eclipse section of the Sys-con.com website has posted a review of Zend's latest offering for PHP developers - Zend Studio for Eclipse.

Zend saw that this was a great place to cozy up to and has been developing a professional version of its PDT environment (released earlier this year) for over a year now. The PDT version is its open source free-ware version of an editor IDE that is based on the Eclipse foundation materials. This article will attempt to introduce you to the Professional version that will be released soon.

They take an overview look first and the install process and what kind of "feel" the interface has. They also dive a little deeper into some of the other aspects of the software like the code editor, the debugger, preferences and the code gallery.

James McGlinn has posted some of his thoughts on the recent announcement from Zend concerning the "open to the public" beta they've moved their Zend Neon IDE into.

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.