If you're a Zend Studio IDE user and are having trouble on the latest release of Apple's operating system (Snow Leopard), Davey Shafik might be able to help. In these two posts he walks you through how you can fix a crashing issue and a problem that comes up when selecting text.

For the first problem:

OSX Leopard, it has seemed for a while, like the app was decaying - growing progressively crashier the more I used it. Literally, to the point where I could use it. I think, however, I have solved the issue. [...] This just explicitly makes it use JVM 1.5, which is, after all, what it was built for.

And for the second (text selection):

If you are still using Zend Studio 5.5, and recently upgrade to Snow Leopard, you will have spotted pretty quickly there is a pretty severe display bug when selecting text. The reason for this, is that Snow Leopard only ships with Java 1.6 and 1.3 (wtf?) [...] It essentially comes down to this: Grab the Java 1.5 JDK from Leopard (original) and then tell OSX to use the 32bit version by default.

You can find out more information on the cause of this problem here.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new article looking at the Zend Studio for Eclipse IDE and testing of the latest version (and a bit of the latest beta) by Marc Plotz

I have been using Zend Studio For Eclipse for over a year now and although I started using it around version 5.5, which was rocky to say the least, I am currently using version 6.1.2. and testing 7.0 Beta--which seems rather promising with its error reporting even extending to Zend Server, should you have that installed as a localhost. Throughout the past year I have become rather attached to "my Zend" and I can honestly say that after trying another (Free) Eclipse based IDE I found myself gravitating back to "my Zend" faster than the "Other One" could uninstall itself.

He talks about the IDE's interface, the installation process and includes some screenshots of the user interfaces for repository browsing and code navigation (and manual reference support!)

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 this post on the Zend Developer Zone mentions, Zend is joining in on the European WinPHP Challenge by offering additional prizes to the winners.

Zend is announcing today that they are joining up, and are offering as prizes to the 3 winners a one year subscription to Zend Server, and licenses for Zend Studio. The winners will be announced at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam.

This year's challenge has already started, so the registration is closed but you can keep up with the (six) contestants on this page of the DPC wiki.

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

Kamran Usman has posted some of his opinions about Zend - more specifically how he thinks they're headed in the wrong direction, moving away from the spirit of the PHP language.

Zend, the so called PHP Company is heading towards an unfriendly, commercial direction which I don't like. I mean, PHP was supposed to be an open source project, I see more focus from Zend on marketing and selling their commercial development tools, certifications and training kits, and less towards creating a free ecosystem that helps in making PHP a more accessible platform for everyone.

As a specific example, me mentions the recent Zend Server release and how they even contradict themselves in their own documentation. He mentions Zend Studio (Eclipse and bloated) and the Zend Framework (sloppy docs and slow) as further examples of things that Zend has either messed up or has not spent enough time on to make a quality product.

Smashing Magazine has put together an article comparing sveral of the popular PHP IDEs on a list of about twenty different features:

Everyone wants to be more productive, make fewer mistakes and write good code. Of course, that all depends on you, but in most cases integrated development environments (IDEs) can help you achieve those goals more easily. Unfortunately, choosing the right IDE is very difficult because a lot needs to be considered. [...] In this post, we'll take a close look at the most popular PHP IDEs, exploring their functions, comparing them in a table and drawing some conclusions.

The article is less about finding the "best of the best" our of the reviewed IDEs and more about helping you figure out which one would be the right fit for you. They compare them in the features they offer - syntax highlighting, navigation, debugging, versioning and more. There's even a handy chart with all of these laid out for each editor they reviewed (PDT 1, PDT 2.0, Zend Studio 6 & Netbeans 6.5).

On the Adobe Developer Connection site Richard Bates has recently posted a tutorial covering the integration of PHP and Flex as developed in Zend Studio/Flex Builder.

Tight integration between Flex and a server-side language means that your users will have an intuitive, engaging user experience with all the functionality they need. For developers, tight integration between PHP and the Flex development environments can provide big benefits by ensuring a smoother workflow for coding, debugging, and managing a project. You can make the most of such a unified environment by using Adobe Flex Builder and Zend Studio for Eclipse together.

He starts with the basics - installing everything and getting it all up and running, then making a sample "Hello World" application on both the PHP (backend) and the Flex (frontend) sides. Included in the tutorial is a look at sending XML out to the Flex application from PHP.

Michelangelo van Dam has put together a book review of the Addison-Wesley/Pearson book "Zend Studio for Eclipse - Developer's Guide":

This book is in my opinion a beginner's guide into using ZSE, aiming at PHP developers that have a knowledge of general concepts like versioning, debugging and refactoring. I personally was hoping to see advanced settings to tune the IDE into a powerful developer's tool, but it was merely a basic explanation with the correct terminology for a product that I've been using well over two years now (yes, I was also beta-tester for it).

He keeps it short but does note that the book can be a good asset for those just getting into Eclipse but if you're already past that level, it wouldn't hold much for you.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Kevin Yank takes a look at a recent version of the NetBeans IDE (version 6.5) that comes bundled with improved PHP support.

Long dismissed as a "toy Java IDE", NetBeans - Sun's open source Integrated Development Evironment (IDE)-has really grown up in recent years. No longer is it just for Java, either: for web developers, NetBeans 6.5 now supports Ruby and PHP out of the box. Surprisingly, that support is so good that it now compares favourably to more established competitors like Eclipse, Komodo IDE, and Zend Studio.

He mentions the built-in/user-defined auto-complete the has built in as well as code templates, support for phpdoc documentation blocks, and other functionality for helping with Javascript, HTML and CSS.