Mar
After another hang up from Zend Studio for Eclipse (the IDE formerly known as Zend Studio) in which about 10 minutes of unsaved work was lost, I threw in the towel and went back to good old Zend Studio 5.5. For those not in the know (ie, You The Reader), Zend Studio is a line of development software for PHP from Zend. Having recently revamped their product to combine it with an eclipse project named PDT (PHP Development Tools), they created what would appear to be better but is ultimately inferior product.
Having used Studio for Eclipse for over two months religiously (~10 hours a day) you could say I have gotten pretty used to it. However, there is no getting past the hangups, which are not acceptable for a professional developer.
Firing up the old Studio 5.5, I was shocked on the apparent difference in responsiveness. I was so used to Studio for Eclipse that I forget how much faster the old 5.5 handles.
No more will I see the dreaded ‘Building PHP projects: 0%’ hoping it will not hang yet again.. especially when I hit the save button only to find out it has been queued behind that cursed process (which of course, will never finish… forcing a manual shutdown and loss of code).
Zend Studio for Eclipse has some nice ideas - like a code analyzer and an integrated unit-testing with code coverage statistics. Too bad those features which sound great in theory are the downfall of this software product - it is the code analyzer that seems to be a big reason for the build process hangs (in response to a support ticket I posted to Zend, I was instructed by a support employee to turn off code analyzing.. It’s great to know that they are aware of the instability of this feature. However the Studio continued to hang up). And I spent several days (!) trying to make my unit-tests run from inside the IDE (ultimately failing despite some small successes).
You can say many things about me, but when it comes to making computer related things GO, I am your guy. The fact that I could not make Studio for Eclipse run the tests… Goes a long way for me as indication for the maturity of this software product.
If you are a PHP developer considering the move to eclipse, my advice is give this one a pass. At least until it matures enough to be a worthy replacement to the old Studio 5.5.
I just loaded the Studio for Eclipse and it’s going nuts. I did a little searching for this infinite Building Workspace message and it seems that lots of people are having these issues…
Entirely unacceptable. I mean seriously, is this thing in beta? I guess I should cut my losses now and go back to 5.5. Of course it has a couple issues of its own (see my blog), but all in all is a pretty good tool.
I found your blog because of this issue, but I’ll throw you on my blogroll though and come back by. Always nice to come across a fellow developer.
Comment by DNoe — 14 Mar @ 1:35 am
I just hope Zend doesn’t take the Microsoft approach, seeing they have the lockdown on PHP development prodcuts… I don’t want to wait 4 years for a stable version of Zend Studio for Eclipse.
Nice to hear from a fellow developer!
I saw on your homepage that you are starting up as well (and considering funding and so forth). If you need need advice on development or the start-up process, I am always happy to help a fellow PHP dev.
Comment by Eran Galperin — 14 Mar @ 1:59 am
Amen brother. I have been experiencing the same problems. Also, their SVN plugin doesnt work. It doesnt actually commit like 50% of the time. Luckily, you can install the Subclipse plugin.
Comment by Matt Walsh — 27 Mar @ 7:51 pm
I found this blog too because I am sick and tired of the dreaded “Building PHP Projects” feature that seems to go on forever. I thought i wasn’t going to make a deadline on a project when I saw your idea about Zend Studio 5.5 and remembered I had that installed. I’m so fed up with this I’m looking at PHP for Delphi now.
Comment by BIgdeal — 28 Mar @ 12:06 am
Actually I’m quite pleased with the move back to 5.5 so far… It has everything I need and its super stable. Tell me if you find anything interesting
Comment by Eran Galperin — 28 Mar @ 1:01 am
I’ve been using Dreamweaver, when finally accepted that it’s not made for php developing, I started searching, zend studio seeamed to be good, OMG!!, it is incredibly buggyyyyy, I’ll try 5.5, If it’s the same thing, then good bye to Zend.
Comment by ACBC — 28 Mar @ 9:43 am
[…] found at least as many of the same issues with the software as Eran Galperin did. I experienced the issues with the build and had to kill the task several times. And I too hate the […]
Pingback by Downgrade to Zend Studio for Eclipse « Swineless — 31 Mar @ 9:40 am
One day of use, go over this annoyance as well and haven’t even gone with a few days trial of this software.. got to this site and I decided it doesn’t worth it. ZendStudio 5.5 is a great tool, although it is buggy as well. I have one question though.. I was about to install 5.5.1 update version, but I am afraid to do it :).. any experience anybody with this version? I already found this problem
Thanks and great post,
Greetings from Argentina,
a.=
Comment by ariel — 08 Apr @ 6:44 pm
Yes it’s true, Studio 5.5.1 doesn’t auto-complete super-globals for some reason (it just doesn’t auto-complete them. They are of course still available for use). It’s a minor annoyance and I’ve forgotten about it to be honest.
Aside from that, 5.5.1 has been super stable for me, not even one crash since going back from Studio for Eclipse.
Comment by Eran Galperin — 08 Apr @ 8:20 pm
Thanks for replying. I installed Zend Studio 5.5.1 and I found that this problem of the auto-completion of server globals has a wider scope actually. The problem I am noticing is that nothing starting with an underscore is included in the auto-completion. Either variables or functions. It’s a bit annoying for me because I use sereral helper functions with an underscore in the beginning.
Anyway thought it was worth mentioning, switched back to 5.5
a.=
Comment by ariel — 11 Apr @ 7:04 pm
Now that you mentioned I realize you are right, variables/methods beginning with underscores are not auto-completed. I suggest you file a bug report about it with Zend, from my experience they take those pretty seriously (filed several myself), and hopefully it will return by 5.5.2.
Comment by Eran Galperin — 11 Apr @ 10:29 pm
Hi, I also found this (interesting!) blog searching for the “building php projects” message, but my experience is a little different:
I’ve been using Eclipse PDT (http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/) for amost 3 years now (previously on Texpad) and I never really felt like Zend did the job. Really, there’s a lot more to the Eclipse. More than Zend would ever be able to achieve.
1) the interface with views and perspectives, keyboard shortcuts, autodocs, hinting, hover tips, folding, …
2) configuration, very fine grained
3) php, xml (any doctype), js, xhtml, css, … all languages with auto-complete and validation
4) plugins: uml, database modeling, just name it
Probably the reason why Zend switched.
Now the funny thing is I never got the error before, until some days ago, when I enabled (for the first time in my life) the Eclipse auto-update feature. So, clearly it’s some issue with one of the many eclipse plugins, just going nuts…
Just download the PDT All in One pack and you’ll be fine (very fine…)
But, off course, I will try to get round this problem, I need that auto-update on for other reasons.
Comment by andrezero — 10 May @ 3:53 am
Same problem here! Utterly frustrated with Zend. Their tech support obviously knows of the problems, yet they act as if this is the first time they hear about it and ask you to do all kinds of things.
We dumped Studio for Eclipse and went back to good old Studio 5.5. Only problem is that the debug environment got all messed up. Still working through that one.
The maddening thing about it is that Zend got the money for two licenses for Studio for Eclipse that are useless. Thanks Zend!
Comment by georgebaker — 22 May @ 4:30 am
I have some inside information that a much stable release is under way. Hang in there with 5.5 for now
Comment by Eran Galperin — 22 May @ 12:32 pm
Just got back to this blog post after quite a while. Any news about this ‘much stable release’. I am still with 5.5 though…
Comment by ariel — 21 Jul @ 11:01 pm
Well, I’m not sure what everyone else is seeing, but after upgrading to version 6.01 there is still a boatload of issues that are just not working right. Zend support suggested starting with a brand new workspace to address them and to increase the memory footprint that Eclipse uses. We’ll have to see.
Some of the issues that are still showing up I can’t see how a workspace refresh addresses them, such as the path assist feature (filling in suggestions from the file/folder list during a require statement), which is so slow that I have to type the path and file name of the include or require before adding the actual PHP command for require or include.
Zend still has plenty to catching up to do if Zend for Eclipse can be taken as a serious development tool.
I sticking with 5.5 and will evaluate other development environments to switch to. Zend has lost me as a loyal customer.
Comment by georgebaker — 22 Jul @ 12:02 am