PHP for Eclipse - PHPeclipse vs PDT
patrick — Fri, 2008-04-11 13:44
Back in March somebody questioned the relevance of this plugin
referring to PHPeclipse. I think it's very relevant.
I mentioned my previous experience with Eclipse and PHPeclipse in Eclipse 3.3.0 - Europa (plus plugins!) so I won't repeat it here.
To rehash and sum up the general attitude that seems to be coming against PHPeclipse - why bother with PHPeclipse, you should be contributing to PDT. We've also received the attitude in IRC (#phpeclipse on irc.freenode.net) that we're causing a division in the community and instead of wasting our time with PHPeclipse we should be contributing to PDT along with the rest of the community. Usually this last seems to be from people who are unfamiliar with Eclipse in general and just discovered PHPeclipse and/or PDT.
First a bit of a history lesson. I'll skip the PHP history lesson (see wikipedia entry for PHP for history and some other info), suffice to stay it started way back in '95 and the people behind it started Zend and Zend eventually created Zend Studio, a commercial IDE for PHP development. I'm not sure when Zend Studio was originaly released, but I've seen an article for Zend Studio 2.0 dated in '02... it's been around a while. Zend Studio has always been proprietary and requires a license fee ($99 for standard or starting at $399 for professional unless you go for quantity).
Wikipedia entry for Eclipse began as an IBM project and was eventually open sourced in '01. Eclipse is *free* relies upon community support, including several developers paid by companies to devote most of their time to working on Eclipse. Eclipse is used for many different programming languages by many different programmers.
PHPeclipse was started in Nov of '02 and fills a small niche in the world of Eclipse. PHPeclipse is also free and relies on a much smaller community than Eclipse for support... it's a subcommunity of Eclipse. I would say 1 of PHPeclipses largest problems is that it's developed in Java (Eclipse and all it's plugins are programmed in Java) by a bunch of PHP developers. This means that the number of PHP developers that can actually contribute large amounts of useful code is limited.
I can only guess that Zend, realizing the popularity of Eclipse, figured they should get involved and either... Didn't bother to do a simple google search for Eclipse PHP
or... Decided to create an introductory trial version (crippleware), label it as open source, and announce it to the world as the glorious PDT. If you don't think it's crippleware, please view the Zend Studio - Edition Comparison page.
Yes I do realize that Zend has released the source code and it's available under the Eclipse license, but... Just try submitting code that impliments the missing elements between PDT & Zend Studio and have them actually appear for everybody using PDT.
PDT (wikipedia entry for PDT) was started in '06 and the first release was in '07. So, let's do some math... PHPeclipse was started in '02 and PDT was started in '06... I know, this can be very difficult to figure out which project started first and which project came after. The second 1 would be considered to be causing a division within the community... wouldn't it?
As long as both projects continue I don't see what the big deal is. Everybody works differently and likes different things. That's why some people like just a text editor that does syntax highlighting for everything (such as TextPad, Kate, etc). Others like full blown WYSIWYG IDEs with wizards that build most of the code for them.
I've loaded up PDT a couple times... it's kind of interesting, but on average it doesn't do what I want. Every other plugin seems to allow me the choice of whether I want to single or double click to open a file, but not PDT. Not to mention the redundancy of some things. Can't I turn off the duplicated outline in the PHP Explorer?
Terrrrrrrrrrrrrrrible ! Let
Howard Fridge (not verified) — Wed, 2010-01-06 10:44Terrrrrrrrrrrrrrrible ! Let see this programmation skills less flash website builder create a free flash website
I'm also considering moving
Duncan Jones (not verified) — Thu, 2009-05-28 06:30I'm also considering moving back to PhpEclipse, due to problems with code assistance in PDT.
PDT doesn't show new variable and function names in auto-completion lists until the document has been saved, which gets a little irritating.
Also, I tend to find PDT offers a subset of auto-complete suggestions on first attempt (Ctrl-space) and only shows a "full" list on the second successive press of Ctrl-Space. Perhaps this is by design.
I have recently (may 2009)
12aapjes (not verified) — Sun, 2009-05-24 11:08I have recently (may 2009) ditched PDT 2.0.x in favor of PhpEclipse 1.2.x. Kept having problems with code assist in PDT :-(
Do like PhpEclipse better because it's more stable and faster too.
Personally I have had the
patrick (not verified) — Wed, 2009-05-20 06:58Personally I have had the misfortune off having to use PHPEclipse at the company I work for before we moved to PDT. PDT seems younger but the code base seems to be based on the Zend IDE as it had it's behavioural quirks from the start.
PhpEclipse, maybe because it was an older version just did not have the level of auto complete that the Zend/PDT ides have. PDT from version 1 was as complete as Zend ever was( though the PDT developers broke lost of stuff in the 2.0 so the 2.0.1 all in ones are the way to go )
Zend never documented the auto complete that well but it is the usual @return objecttype phpdoc etc.
I used to test all the main ides ( komodo, phped, phpeclipse ) to see how they could compare to the zend auto complete and the only one that could was PHPEd. Basically in my eyes if it cannot do accurate autocomplete( not show every method in every object ) on
1.a member object in a class
2.a reference returned from an object (eg singleton getInstance method call, factory method etc )
It is a complete fail.
All the code I work on and have pretty consistently worked on is pure OOP. Opening files to work out what methods there are with what parameters is a waste of focus( having to look at implementation when not needed is a distraction). Both will have eclipses crazy mru rules so it is even more essential not to have to open files when they are not needed. It also highlights slack naming conventions when mosty things are not accesible by the first 3 characters easily( shows inobvious naming or bad verb usage; get used in front of everything including starting the name of creation methods is a main one.
There is a potential habit of coding worse to get around limitations of an ide, such as not putting things at the right level of abstraction due to it is is easier at the eyeline.
I switched to Zend years ago before I came here and PHPEclipse just caused a mental fight. I might sound like a PDT fanboy, but really I am a fanboy of IntelliJ. While PDT might not come no where near it, it is the closest thing to it for free in the the PHP world( i'd pay for a good ide but not free to do due to company policy ) .
Good tools allow people without eidetic memory to write good code more easily.
Agreed ! PHPeclipse is
Mediocre-Ninja.blogSpot.com (not verified) — Sat, 2008-11-08 11:24Agreed !
PHPeclipse is totally better . All it lacks is just PR .
(And maybe because the PDT guys is spreading FUD)
PHEW! It's nice to finally
R.J. Steinert (not verified) — Mon, 2008-10-27 15:41PHEW! It's nice to finally find some info on the difference between the two projects. Just checked out phpeclipse.de. Seems to be a lot nicer than the last time I visited it (December 07').
Nice history lesson. I will
mike stewart (not verified) — Sat, 2008-08-30 15:15Nice history lesson. I will investigate the crippleware angle, very interesting. (Hope it's not FUD).
However, I agree with joe schmoe (the comment above). PHP Eclipse website does the project a disservice. I'm not sure it appears dead, but it is poorly organized and comes off as snobbish as a result. If you want to draw in fresh users (e.g., new community) the front page simply needs to be aimed at phpclipse n00bs. PDT website was much easier for a new user to navigate and understand what to download, how to setup, and how to get going.
Both do a poor job at helping n00bs understand the elements required to setup (remote) debugging for web development. Seems they should be geared towards that, as that is the appeal of an IDE. (I = Integrated)
Totally agree, I've been
joe schmoe (not verified) — Tue, 2008-06-17 14:28Totally agree, I've been using PHPeclipse for years, and have tried switching to PDT on three separate occasions (at different points in its development) and always found PDT lacking in comparison to PHPeclipse. The biggest problem PHPeclipse has however, its actually its website. -which does an amazing job of making PHPeclipse 'appear' to be a dead project. PHPeclispe desperately needs to make more regular updates, many people don't notice (and are traditionally averse to) the nightly builds and thus it 'appears' that the latest release was something like 4 years ago, and that there is no timeline/project plan for new features or further development. If someone doesn't take the reigns and 'manage' the project, then I fear the 'PHPeclipse community' will not find any new members and as a consequence continue to shrink.