NYCPHP Meetup

[Mark Armendariz]

I've been a huge fan of Homesite for years.  Love the regex search and
replace, code snippets, fairly stable built in ftp support (most stable of
ide's I've worked with).  I moved to DWMX after it came out, mostly because
it uses Homesite's code base for the editor (at least as far as I can tell,
it does).  The coloring of HTML, JS and PHP (and CF) is near perfect.  Makes
digging through a lot of code - especially other people's - much easier.

Their quasi CVS sucks, but the FTP for DW is pretty solid.  I generally
develop remotely, and I hit Ctrl+S every 5 seconds, and barely notice that
the file is actually uploading every time (they COULD make it even more
invisible, but it's not bad as is).  The php code completion is pretty
decent, the HTML code completion is perfect, and I miss it when I use
anything else. (Typing in a <td> and have the </td> appear immediately is
quite addictive).

My primary complaint with it is the overhead of the WYSIWYG stuff.  I'd
prefer to be able to disable them entirely.  I generally use it as my blunt
tool, esepecially when working on html / php pages, or on sites that
designers use, as a lot of the designers I work with use it, and I can 'see
it as they do'.

When working with more code heavy projects, I tend to go to Zend, but that's
more of a lesser of evils choice.  The code completion and code analyzer is
pretty good.  It gives you help with your defined vars and such, which I'd
like to see expanded to array elements.  I really like their object explorer
for digging through larger classes, although there is plenty of room in that
end for features, especially with php 5 rearing it's head.  I haven't been
able to get the cvs to work yet, but that's most likely due to my own
ignorance.  I'm dying to get into the debugger as I've heard great things
about it here and elsewhere (one day I will have that local dev server to do
so).  The Ftp support is pretty good, although seemingly buggy at times.
Oh, and the projects thing is just bad.

It could be a great resource to have a feature by feature comparison and
multiple reviews of the tools we use.  I know, I'm always looking for better
tools to make my code filled days more pleasant.

Mark