Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in on the “PHP Development Tools (PDT)” talk here at EclipseCON. I haven’t used PDT since it’s inital release last year so it was great to see what they’ve been doing. Yossi Leon the Project Leader provided an overview of the PHP perspective and the various views. Then he went on to demonstrate the debugger which currently only supports Zend’s close sourced debugger protocol. However he did mention that there is a patch for Xdebug support if you’re feeling brave and want to compile PDT. For the most part PHPEclipse provides all the features that PDT does but there are a good handful of features not in PDT that PHPEclipse currently supplies. However, there were a couple neat features that I’d like to see make their way into PHPEclipse. Personally, I attened this talk because I’ve had one question on my mind since Zend proposed a PHP plugin for Eclipse. That question being, “Will Zend be releasing a commerical version of PDT?” Come to find out PDT is NOT a plugin itself but a framework which a plugin can be build upon. After learning this I had to reword my question to, “Will Zend be releaseing a commercial IDE based on PDT?” Which of course the answer to is yes. I was unable to find out when but Yossi did say it should be surfacing soon.
Now knowing this raises another question, “Should PHPEclipse switch to PDT as it’s underlying framework or do we continuing developing the current framework.” This is a question that only can be answered by the PHPEclipse developers and community. I personally wouldn’t have an issue with the switch because Yossi informed me that they will be creating a generic debugger interface to support multiple debuggers. This is something that the PHPEclipse developers have been discussing for quite some time since we have support for both DBG and Xdebug. The only concern left is what influence will Zend have upon PDT because of their interest in developing a commercial IDE upon it. Having a 100% open source project such as PHPEclipse involved in the development of PDT might be a good idea. What do you think should PHPEclipse switch to PDT?
Tags: eclipsecon, PHP, Xdebug, Zend
I did a series of blog posts on this topic last year:
http://pooteeweet.org/blog/377
http://pooteeweet.org/blog/366
http://pooteeweet.org/blog/357
http://pooteeweet.org/blog/350
http://pooteeweet.org/blog/348
I could have told you a year ago that there will be a commercial IDE based on eclipse from Zend. This also explains why they decided not to go with the open standard for debugging protocols. Instead they will add a layer on top, that can then be made to also speak the standard, because the standard is of course their closed source thing (which they said they will make available free of charge at some point). The “official” reason for this is, that they know their debugger better. Then again they also never bothered to ask Derick or Shane about the open standard.
I think PHPEclipse’s top priority should be to get itself going again! Where is that 1.1.9 release?
There’s Eclipse 3.2 for a long time now, but still no matching PHPEclipse release (and next time, please jump on the joint release train too). Same for XDebug support: it’s supposedly near finished (remote debugging?) for a long time now, but not released.
If there’s long term good in using PDT, sure go for it. But never forget to support your users in the here and now. We, the users, would loose out in case of a two year rewrite to 2.0. We want maintained compatibility with the Eclipse ecosystem (=3.2, 3.3, etc.) and completed, released features, rather than plenty of nice, but half materialized ideas.
Yeah, it seems like a great idea to switch over. I particularly like the aspect of using different debuggers as I have run into some ‘issues’ with the current way things are done. I’m not a PHPEclipse developer, but I do use it daily.
Excellent software, I hope it continues to improve.
Any reason why my post from a few days ago was not allowed to be shown?
I agree with Wim in that I use PHPEclipse every day, and anything that would make current versions better would not be wasted since that knowledge could be ported to PDT when it’s avail.
I use EasyEclipse (just another build of phpEclipse). I realy tried to setup it’s debugger and I’ve got it working, but it realy slows my system, so I decided not to use debug features.All this amount of running Java realy slows all process. I can put several “echo” commands and find all errors before the debug gets result.
And I realy don’t like to add debug session to URL
@Davert if you haven’t tried the new nightly build of PHPEclipse I’d recommend you do so. It contains a bug fix which caused the CPU to hit 100%. Let me know your milage