New on the DotVoid blog Danne Lundqvist has posted about the experience of two weeks with the Zend Studio for Eclipse software as a primary editor.

After more than ten years with Emacs and terminal flipping as my primary development environment, whether for C, PHP, WSDL, HTML/CSS or javascript, I decided to try (I mean really really try) an IDE for a while. As PHP is my main focus these days I have been looking towards Zend Studio for Eclipse. I figured Eclipse with it's maturity must work well enough on linux.

Danne talks about the transition from editor to IDE (shortcuts? features? where is everything?) including importing a project in from a subversion repository. He had a few issues as he started out - technical glitches, problems with subversion integration and encoding support - but lots of other good things too (phpDocumentor support, code folding, inline errors/warnings).

In this new post to the symfony blog today Fabien talks about some of the "small things" that help to make this latest version of the framework (1.2) even better.

As for every symfony version, we try to simplify the API and make it more intuitive and powerful. Here are some examples that you will soon enjoy in symfony 1.2.

There's four included in the post (and many more in the framework):

• Application name in CLI tasks
• Native PUT and DELETE support from the browser
• Shortcuts in the response
• sfValidatorSchemaCompare validator

Joshua Eichorn mentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

On the KillerSoft blog today, there's a few comments from Clay Loveless about his trial of Textmate, specifically when dealing with phpDocumentor comment blocks.

I've been a BBEdit user for a decade, and despite my switch to Zend Studio last fall for the bulk of my PHP development, I still find myself going to plain text editors for little tweaks, or less formal "hack it out" efforts.

There are a few things that I've grown very accustomed to as a Zend Studio user over the past several months. One of those is typing "/**" in a PHP document and having a full phpDocumentor docblock appear magically, with the cursor insertion point set on the first line of the comment area.

Unfortunately, TextMate doesn't handle it quite that way, but he's found a similar way to accomplish it - using "doc_cp" followed by a TAB. It doesn't quite handle the preformatted blocks as well as Zend's software does, but that's nothing the scripting features of TextMate can't take care of - he shows you how.