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.

We’ve been reading every feedback,  tried to reproduce the bugs, analyze the feature request and come up with a better product based on that.

Zend Studio for Eclipse introduce a new level of features which makes the development experience smoother and shorter. Some of the features are:

• Refactoring - Some people call it smart Find and Replace in files, others familiar with it from Java development. What i’m sure that this feature is a must when you want to rename a PHP element and you want to do it smartly with minimum side effects.
• Code Generation - No doubt that writing getters and setters for your PHP Class variables is important but a boring and time consuming task. What would you say if Zend Studio for Eclipse would do that for you in just 3 clicks (Right click, Source -> Generate Getters and Setters and Finish). If you’re picky in what you want to generate it might take 3 more seconds. Very efficient. You can generate also PHP Class or Interface skeleton, Zend Framework Controllers and more.
• PHPUnit Testing - We all heard about Test Driven Development but we are not sure how to implement it. On the other hand we might have a web application and we want to test its units to make sure it doesn’t break every time we change something. PHPUnit Testing in Zend Studio for Eclipse provides an easy way to create new Test Cases, Test Suites, run tests and get a visual summary of a the test results including an option to export it to HTML or XML.

There are great amount of new features available in the new release of Zend Studio for Eclipse which will make you a happy and efficient PHP developer.

Stay tuned!

Yossi Leon

What’s the best way to learn about a new product? To see a short movie about the different features!

I’ve created bunch of videos about the different features of Zend Studio for Eclipse Beta.

Each video is 3-4 minutes long, so you don’t need to spend the entire afternoon on that.

Check them out at:

http://www.zend.com/products/zend_studio/eclipse/videos

Enjoy,

Yossi Leon

Last week was Zend/PHP Conference 2007 which was very successful with the launch of the exciting Zend Studio for Eclipse Beta.

The next up-coming event, which is more open source rather than commercial like, is OS Summit Asia 2007.

It’s the first time for this kind of event, in terms of Apache and Eclipse join together for one event, and it’s taking place in Asia as well.

If you look at the interest of Eclipse in the world, you can easily see that China, Japan and other Asian countries take great portion in it, so it’s not surprising having a conference there.

I will be speaking there about the harmony between Apache, Eclipse and PDT.

Talk with your bosses and take part in this great event. It’s going to be amazing!

See you there,

Yossi Leon.

Update - The conference was postponed to next year, stay tuned - OSSummit 2008

If you’re not sure what PDT is, you’ve heard so many people talking about it as the next development environment for PHP, and you want to know what this is all about, then here is your chance.

On October 2nd at 9am PDT (Pacific Daylight Time not PHP Development Tools :)) I will be conduction a Webinar about PDT.

This Webinar will include a short history about the PHP Development Tools framework project, some statistical information (downloads, committers, bugs) and a demonstration of the project. The demonstration includes the different perspectives (PHP and PHP Debug) and the different views under each perspective. We will go through the creation of a PHP project, a PHP file and a debug session, where we will illustrate the debug features. During the presentation we will also see the relations to the WTP project which the PHP project is based on.

You can register and read further information about it here: http://live.eclipse.org/node/352

See you there.

P.s. You didn’t hear it from me, but some very exciting news are planned to be announced in Zend Conference. Stay tuned.

Yossi Leon.

Hi All,

I’m very excited that after almost two years of work on the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) framework project, next week we are going to launch its first release (1.0).

Many people (more than 200) contributed to this project, mainly by testing its functionality and providing valuable feedbacks. It’s amazing how much power the PHP community holds brining up such open source projects with great stability and functionality.

It’s amazing that at the early stages of this project we didn’t know much about Eclipse platform and how the Eclipse.org system works and today we have 40K downloads a month of a project that was not released yet. We did some mistakes on the way which helped us learn and understand about the Eclipse regulations and infrastructure.

Stay tuned, next week it’s happening, PDT will introduce the new standardization of PHP development tools.

You can download PDT from:

www.zend.com/pdt/ (includes an integrated Debugger)

Or

www.eclipse.org/pdt/

I would like to thank all the developers, contributors and Eclipse members who made this happen.

Yossi Leon

PDT Project Leader

If you didn’t participate in the webinar i’ve been conducting last month, you can click on the link below and get an understanding what Zend offers today in terms of development tools.

Some of the discussed issues:

- How to improve productivity and code quality using Zend Studio

- How to distribute PHP applications while retaining full control of your intellectual property

- How to extend your PHP development environment

Webinar: http://www.zend.com/webinar/download?product=platform&name=devtools-20070815-overview.flv

If you guys are interested in PHP development tools (of course you are) and you’re not sure what’s the right tool for you, come to Zend Conference and visit my talk about development tools.

See you there.

IP (intellectual property) approval became something personal to many people involved in the Eclipse projects’ development.  I could say that from our side, we (project committers) had the biggest relief when we were notified that our IP issues have been resolved.

The highlight was this week when i actually met the people involved in these approvals and got the chance to hear the process they have been going through to make this happen.

I must say that it sounds quite a pain going through this and i have much respect to what they’re doing.

PDT 0.7 was actually canceled because we didn’t have the approval on time and we didn’t want to postpone it all the time so we decided to have one last Release Candidate of 0.7 and to proceed to the next version of the PDT - 1.0.

PDT 1.0 is going to be very much like 0.7 but with stability improvements and bug fixes.

We are also going to come up with Summer Camp of features we want to develop but we need the community help in that. Further information can e found in: http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/summer_camp.php

Hi All,

Zend Guard 5.0 beta is now available for you to evaluate and check the new cool features.

Some of the features are PHP 5.2 support, new cool GUI based on Eclipse RCP to manage your projects and ONE configuration file that can be executed from the GUI or from the command line with all the different encoding and obfuscation configuration.

For those of you who are not familiar with encoding and obfuscation of PHP code, it’s time to get into business if you want to have your code secured, scrambled and even run faster.

In order to experience the new Zend Guard 5.0 Beta together with Zend Optimizer 3.3.0 Beta, go to http://www.zend.com/products/zend_guard/zend_guard_5_0_beta.

Feedbacks are more than welcome - guard-feedback@zend.com.

Yossi Leon.

In case you’re in the NY area and you fill like joining a session about the PDT project and Zend Platform 3.0 new features (together with Zend Studio 5.5), come and join us at the NYPHP event, NYC, IBM building @ 590 Madison Avenue, Room 1219 (12th Floor).

Full details are available here: http://www.nyphp.org/content/calendar/view_entry.php?id=105&date=20070227

The second presentation will take place in EclipseCon 2007, Santa Clara, California. This presentation will focus on the PDT project including a demonstration of the different features.

Full details are available here:

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/index.php?page=sub/&id=3720

See you there,

Yossi.

In the last few releases of Zend Studio, we also provided the browsers toolbars and toolbars integration as part of the Studio’s features. The toolbars are available for IE and Firefox browsers.

The toolbar support provides the easiest way to debug or profile your website by a touch of a button.
The best example i can think of is by checking the registration mechanism of your website and initializing a debug session from any editor with the relevant GET/POST parameters is not so easy to accomplish. Instead of all this, all the user needs to do is to select the option to debug the next page from the toolbar and by entering the registration information and submitting the form, the debug session with all the relevant parameters will start in Zend Studio immediately.

Same goes for profiling. Go to your site’s home page (the busiest page probably) and click on the profile button. The profiler results will open immediately in Zend Studio.
In order to illustrate this, I’ve decided to create a demo and to show the simplicity and the easiness of using the toolbars for debugging / profiling your website pages.

The demo is available here: http://files.zend.com/videos/browser_toolbars/.

It’s a great tool, start using it!

If you have any comments or ideas for additional demos, please let me know.

Yossi Leon.