code meets music

Zend sent me an email this week letting me know that there was a Beta Release of the new Zend Studio product available, to try for free. I’d tried previous versions of Zend Studio and found them to be unintuitive, unresponsive and generally clunky so I was interested to see how much of an improvement the new version would be, given that rather than being solely a Zend-made product, it’s built on top of Eclipse, more specifically on top of the free PDT project that I’ve been using as my main IDE for a while now.

It definitely is an improvement, but I’m not convinced that there is enough that PDT doesn’t have that will make it worth paying for:

• The code formatting options are more powerful, there’s a setting for practically every aspect of the language.
• The ‘new Class’ wizard is quite nice, letting you specify the class-name, a superclass and any interfaces and having these, as well as any prescribed methods, filled in for you in the resulting file.
• The variable-renaming feature works, to some degree. In PDT there’s a menu option, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. With Neon, this will find all uses of the name within the current function or class, but it doesn’t make changes in other files- I realise it wouldn’t be possible to find them all, but it’s a shame it doesn’t even seem to try.

There doesn’t seem to be any mention of how much they plan to charge, only that current subscribers to Zend Studio will get the upgrade for free and that it should be released early next year. You can download it here but you do need to register.