When I started to read the book 'Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide' by Peter MacIntyre and Ian Morse, I was particularly interested in those types of [features you haven't discovered yet]. And luckily it contained many of these.

Ivo mentions one in particular that he found interesting, the "Working Sets" that lets you define a set of files within a project that you want to work on. There are a few places where it falls a bit flat, though. He didn't like the code examples that included PHP4 in some places and that the book started off with preferences for features you hadn't even been introduced to yet.

Considering however the overall usefulness of the book in learning the details of the Zend Studio environment, I'm willing to look beyond those weak points, and recommend the book to those that develop in Zend Studio for Eclipse on a regular basis.

Zend Studio for Eclipse is just around the corner. Very soon we are planning to release the product after few beta cycles were we got thousands of feedbacks.

They've added their "new level of features" that they hope will make ZSfE one of the better development experiences out there - refactoring tools, code generation to make some of the basics and PHPUnit testing to make it simpler to debug your applications.

You can find out more about the software and its current release over on its page on the Zend website.

I've been using Zend Studio for Eclipse (beta) for several weeks in a rewrite of a framework and numerous sites at work and overall I really like the IDE. Its got some great features and being based on the eclipse project makes it really extensible and customizable.

He happy overall with the IDE but has come across some bugs in his time developing in it (nine of them) with issues ranging from the SVN functionality and samba out to small syntax sorts of things (like the auto-formatting).

It seems that PHP developers have attracted much attention from the Eclipse community. In the next EclipseCon conference I am going to make two sessions about PDT and its ecosystem.

His two talks are: Developing Rich Internet Application with Eclipse Tools (Wednesday) and Extending the PDT Project (Tuesday).

EclipseCon 2008 is happening March 17th through the 20th in Santa Clara, California and there's still time to get in on the Early Bird Discount for your registration (through Dec. 31st). Check out the conference schedule for a complete list of speakers.

First impressions were that the interface is more refined than Zend Studio's chunky Java widget set, but there is a performance hit - at least the first time it took considerably longer to get started than the current Zend Studio 5.5 (this is on my daily workhorse, an aging but reliable PowerBook G4).

He talks about the workspace setup (Eclipse is familiar to most), how the editor flows, features it includes - like code folding and auto-complete - and the Code Analyzer feature that helps you keep track of potential bugs in your code.

According to this blog entry (sorry, German), you may improve Zend Studio's editor performance by switching off the option "Use OS Look and Feel" (at Tools > Preferences, tab "Desktop", option "Use OS Look and Feel").

According to the comments on the post, this seems to work well.

Here is the comparison of running Zend/bench.php from the PHP source using VC++ 8.0 (Visual Studio 2005) and VC++ 6.0. The test was done on my Lenovo laptop with Celron M 1.6 GHz processor and 1.5 GB ram.

Overall, the differences are pretty minimal, but there are a few places that stand out and have more of a variance than the others (like the 12% difference in the "simplecall" test). Check out the post for the full list of the benchmark results.

Earlier this month, I posted the release announcement for Zend Studio 5.5. Today, I got an email from my friend Avigail pointing me to a new web cast recorded by Yossi Leon the Product Manager, Zender, and all around nice guy has released a web cast walk through of some of the new features in this latest release.

The webcast shows off features like the Java code completion, Zend Framework code completion and integration functionality, and Zend Platform integration. If you've been looking around for a new IDE to work up code in, give the demo a look and see what you think.

Updates to the Zend Platform include support for PHP 5.2, some installation improvements, session clustering enhancements, job queues, several performance enhancements, web service functionality, and much more. Check out the Zend website for complete information.

And the Zend Studio enhancements:

Zend Studio 5.5 is the only IDE available for professional PHP developers, encompassing all the development components necessary for the full PHP application lifecycle. Through a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis, optimization and database tools, Zend Studio improves the quality of applications, speeds development cycles and simplifies complex projects.

Check out the full press release for the full scoop on the update.

A few months back Nusphere emailed me to say that version 4.6 of PhpEd was out, and did I want to trial it. I figured what the heck, and here is what I found out when you compare the two ...Wow, things have changed in PhpEd land! Being a stalwart Zend IDE user I figured it would be only fair to give you a break-down comparison of the two.

He looks at a few different topics:

• The Editor Itself
• PHP IDE GUI Designers = Extinct?
• How do they handle my projects?
• File Uploading
• HTML Support
• Source Control
• Debuggers
• Other Tools
• PHP 5.2

Since he's really trying to find out more about this latest version of PhpEd, he tends to be a bit heavy on the comments towards that (and less of a comparison), but it's definitely a good look at two different IDEs and some of their strengths and weaknesses.