The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new blog post from Yossi Leon about the upcoming release of the Zend Studio for Eclipse:

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.

Andrew Johnstone has posted some of his experience he's had developing with one of Zend's latest offerings - Zend Neon. Neon is the Zend project to bring robust PHP development functionality to the community on top of the Eclipse platform.

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).

Roy Ganor-Shwaartz (Team Leader at Zend for the PDT/Zend Studio for Eclipse projects) dropped us a line to let us know that he'll be speaking at this year's EclipseCon (2008).

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.

James McGlinn has posted some of his thoughts on the recent announcement from Zend concerning the "open to the public" beta they've moved their Zend Neon IDE into.

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 another (German) blog entry as pointed out on the ThinkPHP blog, it's possible to get a performance boost for Zend Studio on Windows with a few mouse clicks.

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.

Edin Kadribasic has posted some benchmarks he's created from the Zend bench.php tool on the latest build he's created with the new version of Visual Studio from Microsoft.

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.

As posted over on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a walk-through that's been posted for the just-released version of Zend's editor - Zend Studio 5.5.

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.

As seen on the Zend Developer Zone, Zend has released the latest versions of two of their products - the Zend Platform Beta 3.0 Beta and Zend Studio 5.5.

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.

On his blog today, Richard Davey has posted a review he's done comparing two of the major PHP IDEs offered - NuSphere's PhpEd and Zend's Zend Studio.

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.

According to this new post on Davey Shafik's blog, there's now a Universal Binary of the latest beta version of Zend Studio available.

I just wanted to make a quick note, to say that Zend Studio 5.5 Beta, though the installer is PPC, the actual ZDE application is an OS X Universal Binary. The speed difference is more than noticable!

You can find out more about Zend Studio from this page on the Zend website and sign up to become a beta tester to gain access to this just off the line Universal Binary release.