IDE Duel — Zend Studio 7 or Dreamweaver CS4

Question

I'm developing PHP apps that leverage several frameworks (though not the Zend Framework yet...) and I make good use of Javascript (mostly jQuery). All mark-up is XHTML, of course, with CSS, etc. I'm looking to move beyond the beautiful simplicity of Notepad++. I'm using Windows Vista. I'm trying to decide between Zend Studio 7 or Dreamweaver CS4.

They seem pretty on par with each other, but the price points are different. I've seen a few lists of "Good things about Dreamweaver" or "Good things about Zend Studio" but I've yet to find a head-to-head comparison.

Any suggestions on the next IDE to move up to? In addition to the language support and basic error checking (syntax-related, like missing semi-colons or something), I'm looking for two things that are absolutely necessary:

1. "Projects" or something similar -- open a project and it gives a tree listing of all related files beneath. I'm pretty sure both support this.
2. As lightweight as possible. Vista's a hog as it is, and I'd like to have a lightweight enough IDE that having 10 files open and moving between them won't drain my resources.

Other niceties:

• Automatic documentation (not sure what the phrase is, the stuff in comments above functions with the @parm stuff).
• Templating.
• SVN support.
• FTP/File upload capabilities.

... And, if Zend or Dreamweaver isn't the thing -- any suggestions about what is?

Answer 1

i would suggest Netbease IDE PHP 6.7.

In is free , not so huge like Zend Studio or Dreamweaver.

It has support for

Syntax-highlighting
Templates PHP Unit JQuery Dojo Code completion for JS / PHP / HTML Version Control (SVN)

and much more..

Download Netbeans

Answer 2

I suggest try few open source alternatives

• Eclipse PDT - Is very good for php but currently don't good support jquery.

• Aptana - I build on top of Eclipse and has good support for JQuery. It also has page preview feature.

You can configure different debuggers to work with them like PDT, Zend, Xdebug... all of them can be configured easily. Zned Studio is also build on top of Eclipse, I have never used that so I can't say anything about it.

Answer 3

I had the same question about year ago. From then I tried many different IDE environments and a found that the most suited one was Netbeans.

The deal with Netbeans was that due to some performance issues it was the solidest IDE there. As sad as it may be, from my perspective it is much better product than the Zend Studio For Eclipse 6 or 7 witch costs about 400$, (trust me I tried it since I unfortunately wasted the money on licence before I actually tested all available options).

It has the best code completion inspection and assistance, witch you can check yourself by downloading these two IDE-s and trying to code complete chaining method calls. Support for unit testing is also something worth mentioning since it works. ZDE also has that feature but it is not that stable since sometimes it wont run.

JavaScript support is also solid, actually I think that is better than one in the Aptana, but the only downside of it is that is pretty slow when working with huge libraries such as Dojo. Now some may argue about that but the fact is that (at least with Dojo&dijit) library it has the best code inspection, and fine code completion support.

My opinion is that the only downside is the lack of support for Zend Debugger, and not so intuitive debugging variable, callstack and breakpoint windows.

For now my felling is that this is the best PHP IDE available, something like the Zend Studio 5.5 when it came out.

Answer 4

Netbeans is the clear choice here as long as you aren't limited on memory. It's got a good-sized footprint, but there's no product that can compare...not even Zend.

That being said, the new Aptana 3 was supposed to bring back full-fledged PHP support that was removed from Aptana 2+ (PDT just isn't a good plugin folks), but now that Appcelerator has taken over Aptana I'm a bit skeptical that the focus toward PHP will continue.

Answer 5

Yes Aptana Studio is good for PHP and also Netbeans. I like Netbeans more because it feels more solid. But Aptana has propably the best auto-complete support for javascript of all editors, but I don't really like the appearance of the editor - looks too 'macish'.

Answer 6

I would recommend both actually, side by side as each has its strengths and weaknesses

Zend Studio is excellent for:

• PHP class coding enables you to view and browse class hierarchies, provides autocomplete, one click access to PHP Manual
• unit testing
• debugging
• profiling
• version control integration

Dreamweaver CS4 for

• HTML coding
• CSS editing
• Other visual design

Answer 7

To me, I still have that impression of Dreamweaver being drag and drop for web "designers" and creating horrible html output that does that validate sometimes. If this still happens with DW CS4, then I would definitely go with Zend Studio.

Zend Studio actually supports with all the Eclipse Plugins that I would like to add for unit testing and continuous integration.

Answer 8

But Aptana and NetBeans are free!!! Which I think Zend editor is not, haven't tried that. I like Netbeans!!! I like Dreamweaver CS4 and use it on daily basis at my job(but not coding php). It's quite nice but I feel it's strength is the help you get with css properties. Besides that it's not better than Netbeans. if you like a shiny cool look like DW so go for Aptana, it has the best javascript autocompletion - really cool!! Saves a ton of time!! Even auto-completion for your JQuery code and other JS frameworks I think.

Answer 9

Actually Dreamweaver has become more of a dev tool (but I'm not entirely convinced of that). It has integration with Subversion which is kind of cool. I like NetBeans because I've done some Java coding in it before and now it has support for PHP which is real nice, and it feels like a real dev. IDE. But DW has this cool gray colors..