Greg Beaver has a look today at the new Zend Development Environment Beta that has been posted, and shares a few thoughts from his perspective.

Today I downloaded Zend Development Environment 5.0 beta to give it a try. I've been using ZDE since version 3.0, and in fact developed all of PEAR 1.4 in ZDE. The server debugger has made it extremely easy to debug complex apps like PEAR_Frontend_Web that have multi-page interactions. It's also been good when trying to develop applications that run on linux and windows, and especially with debugging PEAR's unit tests.

I downloaded and installed ZDE 5.0 beta for windows on my windows XP laptop and it of course worked smoothly and imported options from ZDE 4.0.2 (which is still installed). The two versions co-exist except that project files opened in ZDE 5.0 are no longer accessible in ZDE 4.0, so be careful if you ever plan to use projects in both versions - it's not possible.

From there, he goes on with a few other things he noticed - like a general speedup of the application, enhanced locating of included files, auto-completion features (as Zeev had mentioned), a new built-in help feature, subversion and SFTP support. He definitely seems impressed with it, and, if the previous versions of the IDE were any indication, he has good reason to be.

You can check out and download the Zend Development Environment from the Zend site here...