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. With debugging, profiling, code completion, code formatting and more enabled can help with productivity.

A complete list of features can be found at Zend.

Zend Studio for Eclipse consumes quite a lot of memory and the recommended amount of RAM for eclipse based applications is 2GB, however you can control the amount of memory that eclipse will use by editing the zendStudio.ini file.

Whilst I do like the IDE I have found a number of issues with Zend Studio:

Bugs

• 1. There have been a number of issues revolving around the SVN implementation in Zend Studio for Eclipse which causes the application to hang (SVN support is provided to eclipse by a 3rd party plugin (a company called Polarion)):
  • a) When committing files it locks entire directories and often hangs making Zend Studio for Eclipse unusable, if you have files that are not saved and attempt to do so it queues it as a users pending tasks and because the commit has stalled you cannot save the file.To resolve this I have to kill the process for Zend Studio, shell into the server and cleanup the the projects src, and sometimes have to re-checkout the directories in a project
• 2. When developing via a samba share, it prompts with an incorrect error and does not attempt to re-authenticate when the samba share needs to re-connect and/or does recognise that it is talking via a remote device.
• 3. Auto format adds extra braces to statements, causing syntax errors, strips all comments out of files!
• 4. Importing an auto format does not seem to work correctly.
• 5. When working with multiple open files it can overwrite the contents with another, I believe this is the case with files of a similar name (I’ve only had this occur once, however a colleague experiences this quite frequently).
• 6. Modified file names are prefixed with “>” and when searching for files by pressing a character will not go to that file in PHP Explorer
• 7. Templates do not always get replaced e.g. If the system is slow or you type fnc real quick it doesn’t replace with the template for a function.
• 8.
  

  If you cause a syntax error, whether deliberate or not, a number of items such as auto formatting does not work, or you cannot open the php manual from the contexts menu for a php function. For example if I type “str_shuffle” then use a context menu to it does not open a manual.

• 9. introducing a syntax error and then removing the syntax error doesn’t clear until you save the document.

Resolved

• 1. There was a bug in automatically updating eclipse, which never seemed to work however in the latest release (beta 2) this has now been resolved.