NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

Webmaster wrote:
> Eclipse rocks Jake, and I've been using it to code everything from AS-C# 
> for years! I'd hire you, but i don't have any opening now. :P

I don't think Eclipse is great for PHP. I tried several plugins for PHP and 
they all gave me just more reason not to consider Eclipse as a PHP IDE. I 
don't mean that you can't use it for PHP, but getting decent IntelliSense, 
help, and the debugger to work wasn't easy. Or is there a plugin that does all 
that?
I found NuSpehere's PHPEd to be the best, followed closely by EnginSite's and 
Waterproof's editors. The major difference is that PHPEd has a way better 
debugger implementation and as far as I can tell Luckasoft stopped working on 
the EnginSite PHP Editor. Waterproof is releasing a beta for their new version 
and that might just be worth looking at it again.
Just to note, those are all Windows based IDEs, except for PHPEd, which also 
comes in a Linux version, but since that requires buying the same license 
again I did not bother. Which brings me to the disadvantges of NuSphere. They 
ruin the fun with theit great product by not allowing a license to be valid 
for dot releases. I bought one for 5.0 and three weeks later they released 
5.1. I was quite miffed to find that the 5.0 license won't work for 5.1 and 
the changes weren't that spectacular that paying the upgrade price was worth 
it. I can see that a 5.x license won't work for a 6.x release given that 6.x 
adds substantially more features (and no, fixing bugs and design flaws aren't 
considered new features). I complained about it, but also in this case 
corporate greed won over customer satisfaction. Still, 5.0 does what I need 
and I did get it at a bargain price, so I am not that interested in discussing 
that any further with NuSphere. It's just that I probably switch once I 
outgrow what I got or it no longer works right.

Coming back to the previous topic, everyone has their preference for 
editors/IDEs and often it is just that, a preference, not a quality judgement. 
That is why I even prefer a nicely designed GUI on a server over the command 
line. Not that there is anything bad with using a command line, but for 
example installing a dozen packages via CLI vs. Synaptics makes me appreciate 
the GUI quite a bit. Just a preference, but one shared with many others.

David