Justin Carmony has submitted a post from his blog today that looks at to of the major PHP IDEs - Zend Studio 6 and Eclipse PDT - and compares them on features and functionality.

I've been using Zend Studio (ZS) for the last two years. It is developed by Zend, the company behind PHP. The very first time I used it and it was able to auto-complete my custom PHP classes I was sold. With version 6 of Zend Studio, they integrated Zend Studio with Eclipse, a popular IDE framework. I've been mostly happy with the new version, where as in some areas I felt that things were took a step back.

He compares their ease of installation, how easy they make it to refactor your code, debuggers included, the editor environment itself and, of course, the integration with Zend Platform/Zend Framework.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post detailing some of the new features (a sneak peek) of the upcoming Zend Studio for Eclipse version.

I am very excited to announce that Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.1 has been released, and would like to share with you some of its new features. This release is a "Complete Web Development Environment for PHP Developers", as it provides significant improvements for Web developers who utilize a rich code base that includes PHP, JavaScript, and CSS.

Major updates include the ability to edit the source of Javascript, Dojo and CSS, more Zend Framework integration, improved management tools and lots of bug fixes and security improvements. Screenshots of each of these improvements are in the post, including a look at the SQL query builder tool.

Max Horvath recently posted a how-to on getting the XDebug debugging support up and working in the Zend Studio for Eclipse software.

Zend Studio for Eclipse is a commercial edition of Eclipse plus the PDT plugin and various other additions. Unfortunately Zend decided to disable the Xdebug support of the Eclipse PDT plugin. Nonetheless if you'd like to use Xdebug for debugging your PHP scripts, follow these simple steps to restore the Xdebug functionality of Eclipse.

Its a simple six-step process (not including getting Zend Studio installed) to have the powerful debugging tool ready at your fingertips. You can find more information about setting up the tool here.

According to a new press release from Zend, they've expanded their training course line to include a few more topics - migration from PHP4 to PHP5 and an in-depth look at their Zend Studio for Eclipse IDE.

These courses further expand the portfolio of Zend training courses, which include PHP from introduction to advanced levels, as well as courses about PHP Security, creation of Rich Internet Applications, and the use of major Zend products.

Here's the details:

• Migrating Your Web Applications from PHP v4 to v5 - This webinar guides you through the basics of planning a migration, as well as discussing some of the tools to make the process easier, such as unit testing and PHPDoc. The current class will be held September 9th and 11th and will cost about $300 USD.
• Zend Studio for Eclipse - The Zend Studio for Eclipse Course is designed to provide PHP programmers with a practical, in-depth knowledge of the next generation tool in the Zend Studio IDE family. The current class will start August 25th and will run through September 5th. Cost for the class is about $800 USD.

The PHP Women have officially announced the winners of their "Best Practices" article contest:

Well its been an exciting few weeks on the phpwomen forums as we've been running an article contest for new articles contributed to our "Best Practices" section. We've been overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions and of the follow up comments added by other users - thanks to everyone who has joined in!

The winners are Akrabat for his look at recursion and gerard for his article on CLI tips and tricks. They both have won their own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse, a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro magazine and a chance to have their article published on the magazine's site.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post today, a book review of the Sams Publishing book "Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide" (by Peter MacIntyre and Iam Morse).

My buddy Pete MacIntyre has been after me to review his book for some time now and honest Pete, it's been sitting on my desk since it arrived patiently awaiting my attention. So last night I broke down and went through it. I'll have to say I was impressed with what I saw.

He (the reviewer, Cal) notes that, while the book comes in at about 180 pages - light for a tech book these days - to still gives a great overview of the technology for those already familiar with the Eclipse setup.

As a reminder, if you haven't gotten your entry in for the PHP Women article competition you only have a few days left - the contest ends on the evening of July 31st.

Not sure what the contest is about? Here's the rundown - to enter all you need to do is write up a best practices type of article and post it to the forum. That's it! You'll be entered to win fabulous prizes. The best two entries (as judged by the PHP Women themselves) will be awarded licenses for their very own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse as well as one year subscriptions to Linux Pro Magazine. One of these two winners will also get a bonus prize - to have their submission featured on the Linux Pro Magazine's website.

So what are you waiting for? Write up your article and submit it - time is running out!

We've mentioned it before but we just wanted to remind you again about the article contest that the PHP Women are holding with fame and glory going to the winners (oh, and there's prizes too).

The topic is "Best Practices" and all you have to do to enter is submit an article - long, short, good or bad - over in the Best Practices forum on their site. Want an example? Check this one out.

Now for the good part - there'll be two winners: the best two entries will get the top of the line prizes, licenses for Zend Studio for Eclipse) and, of those two, one will get inclusion of their article into a future issue of Linux Pro Magazine. The other will be gifted with a one year subscription to the same publication.

Others have already posted their articles - why haven't you? You don't have to be female or an expert in your field to contribute, just get out there and write something up for your chance to get in on the goods.

Zend ("The PHP Company") has just secured more funding from TriplePoint Capital based out of Menlo Park, California.

"The market for commercial web-based applications using PHP technologies is growing very fast in all geographies around the world," said Harold Goldberg, CEO at Zend Technologies. "Zend benefits from its strong position in this market, with an expanding list of major companies as customers and partners. We wanted to ensure that we continue our expansion and are therefore pleased to begin this partnership with TriplePoint Capital, a firm whose innovative approach closely aligns with our strategies in the web application market."

Zend is the company behind the popular Zend Studio IDE and the widely used Zend Framework rapid application development platform.

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.