PHP IDEs - PHPed

Ho hum.  I had this morning set aside to get stuck in to my look at PHP IDEs and I have to say that it hasn’t been the greatest success so far.

I roped in Tim at work to help me do some of the comparison and we spend a couple of hours trawling the IDE websites trying to compare features.  At the end of that process the main thing we had learned was that the feature sets were pretty comparable across all the IDEs we were taking a look at (Komodo, eclipse, PHPed, PHPedit, & Zen).  It seems that the only way we are going to narrow the list down was by installing each in turn and taking a closer look.

We’ve pretty much ruled out eclipse at the moment.  It seems that neither of the two forks (phpeclipse and eclipse PDT) are going to be what we are looking for.  PHPeclipse sounds like it is developing slowly, barely keeping up with new software versions, and PDT doesn’t seem polished enough at this time). 

We decided to grab two of the others to look at.  Tim is taking a look at PHPedit and I PHPed.

PHPed

Installation was a breeze and first impressions were pretty good.  I set myself a super-basic task to just get a feel for what was possible:

1. Set up a project and upload a test file to the server
2. Pull data from an existing mySQL table and display it on the page
3. Create a form to put data back in to the same table

Not exactly rocket science is it?

Well, step 1 went fine - taking about 20 seconds.  great start.  Unfortunately it all went a little downhill from there.  Well… more accurately it took a plummet.

It seems that, for whatever reason, you need to manually update some DLL files in order to get PHPed working with all but the most archaic versions of mySQL (It was also suggested that I downgrade server sercurity… sure our clients would be chuffed to bits with that!).  This doesn’t seem a problem if you can just copy the DLL file from elsewhere on your server, but when you are running PHPed on a windows box and developing on a remote unix server (like presumably most of the world do) this isn’t so straight forward. 

This topic has been addressed countless times in the nusphere support forum.  Each time the nusphere carefully explain that it is not a problem with PHPed, but with PHP - which I find interesting as it is not a problem that any editor I have used has encountered.

To be honest, I am bored of fiddling with this trying to get it to work now.  In fact, PHPed is about to get un-installed.  With other IDEs sporting near identical feature lists available I am not too bothered about spending a day day reading forums to get trial software running.  Had it outshone the competition in a feature comparison I may have, but that is not the case.  I might take another look at it later (if it lets me install again), but that does presume that I don’t get on better with one of the other IDEs.

Time to have a peer over Tim’s shoulder and see if he is getting on any better with PHPed’s twin PHPedit.