I want my old (Zend) studio back

09
Mar

I want my old (Zend) studio back

by Eran Galperin on 12:37 am

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.
0% And Waiting
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).

The QUEUE

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.

Categories: PHP, Web Development —

29 Comments »

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
[…] probably the 100th fatal issue in Zend Studio for Eclipse I have had enough. As other have noticed, Zend Studio for Eclipse gets stuck on building projects fairly often and losing work is […]

Pingback by Zend Studio for Eclipse is fail | PHPDevHead — 05 Aug @ 8:12 am
I have the same problem with this building workspace bug. I’ve spent many hours configuring the new Zend on Eclipse to work like the old zend 5.5 did out of the box and it still doesn’t work right. Switching back to the old zend studio so I can get something done.

Comment by Nick — 18 Aug @ 5:52 pm
Just downloaded Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.01 last night. Within 30 minutes of launching it crashed twice. Both times, it could not save my PHP due to a java error.

Luckily, I haven’t purchased it yet… Zend was awesome, but the bugs are just unforgivable.

I’m having a really hard time deciding on a dev environment. I think I’m going to try PDT next.

Comment by Nimic — 11 Sep @ 12:04 am
I also went back to zend studio 5.5. I must have emailed zend maybe about 30 times about different bugs ect and they still seem to want to plow zend studio for eclipse forward, even though it’s been a total nightmare for php developers. Support does know about the problems but they really can’t do much as their job is to sell the new product. I kinda wished that they keep the 5.x version updated until the zend studio 6.1/6.x is more stable.

Comment by PHP Guy — 03 Nov @ 8:00 pm
What is happening at Zend? Why do they kill their most useful application and expect people to use some crap instead?

This is a good time for some other company to step in with Zend Studio replacement. The Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.01 is a total waste of time.

Comment by OE — 13 Nov @ 4:38 pm
We are about to completely stop using Zend Studio, even with the latest version promising fixes. Instead, we are in the process of moving to NetBeans 6.5 for PHP. May not be everybody’s cup (pun intended), but in our opinion it far outperforms Zend Studio for Eclipse on almost all levels.

Good-bye Zend, you had your chance…

Comment by JB — 08 Jan @ 2:20 am
I really dont understand what Zend is thinking. How can you be so blind to think that people are going to use there product when it has so many issues. Zend shouldnt even be released for beta right now let allow a live product! I honestly dont care if they dont want to fix the problems and lose all of there customers just at least give us a copy of 5.5 to download for free or something

Thanks a lot for making this blog i havnt been able to find anything about the issues im having but now i know im not alone! I am going to go get Zend 5.5, thanks again :D.

Comment by Danford — 30 Jan @ 7:10 am
ACBC said “I’ve been using Dreamweaver, when finally accepted that it’s not made for php developing” …

That’s weird, i use DW for php everyday and i find it to be made for php development just fine. It has help text if you stall too long letting you know what to do with that function and then there’s always google. I find that if you know the language you really don’t need the help so much as you need the coloring. Anyway, i find dw cs4 to be a far superior code environment over the new zend and it works quite nice with other languages like .net and coldfusion in case you ever feel like cheating on your language girlfriend.

Comment by Jasn — 20 Feb @ 8:05 pm
I have the same problems with ZSFE (Building workspace …). Does anybody tried an alternative? Like NuSphere, Komodo or just Eclipse with PDT?
I also want js an js library (like ExtJS) support (autocompletion). Does the perfect IDE exists?
Thanks!

Comment by richard — 16 Jun @ 10:36 am
Using Studio 7 with XP 64 bit OS on Intel Core2 Quad with 8 GB of RAM… It takes 10 seconds after a save for the IDE to become responsive again. I have tried turning off Code Analyzer and it doesn’t make any difference… Building workspace always stalls at 19% and then after 5-10 seconds completes. This is an F’ing joke. Why would I pay money for this? I want my old 5.5 version. For time being i guess ill go back to NP++,

Comment by ficuscr — 06 Aug @ 9:20 pm
I have the same problem with version 7.0.0. After 30 hours I have the message: “Building workspace (5%)…” in my screen. I don’t undersand how is it possible. A Zend’s big mistake.

Comment by caminandosolo — 18 Aug @ 11:42 am
I like this post. I took a lot of useful comments from here and for what it worth, somebody mentioned Netbeans, I tried it and I am really really happy. It’s integration with cvs/svn is great. Connection with mysql as well. Debugging PHP code using xdebug is super easy. The IDE is fast enought. A bit bloated as most JAVA IDEs but really good. There are some other interesting issues I have not even tried yet. I threw away my old Zend Studio 5.5.1 in favor of this one and I recommend it.

Comment by ariel — 18 Aug @ 4:35 pm
I also agree with this post - its ridiculous the propagation of these Eclipse based IDE’s - I left Zend behind and went to Aptana when they dumped the Zend 5.5 version.

And now Aptana have made the same mistake and ditched their great builtin PHP development platform for the PDT from Eclipse. Its ugly, it doesn’t work the same.

All these new versions I actually consider regressions in progress.

Come on people lets revolt!!!! I am going back to my backups from years ago to find Zend 5.5 and installing that again.

Comment by timgrin — 16 Dec @ 7:31 am