The PDT project provides a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project encompasses all development components necessary to develop PHP and facilitate extensibility. It leverages the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities.
Project Principles:
- Intuitive and easy to learn
- Seamless integration with the Web Tools project
- Adherence to Eclipse standards
- Extensibility
- Continuous support of PHP developments
To be upfront, I do not like IDE’s. A simple GUI text editor like Kate is fine, or even vi. But hey my boss wants the team to standardise, so I get the job to check out the options.
What can I say about PDT. The biggest, bloated, disorganised piece of software I have seen. I tried Netbeans first and thought it was over the top, but its better than this. Doco for PDT is a joke. What does exist is so poorly written and often out of date. This was not worth wasting my time on.
In reference to the review from `Anon`, whether an IDE is required depends on the kind of PHP work you’re doing. From my perspective, if it is in any way object-oriented (and these days, generally speaking, it should be) then code reflection and auto-completion are fairly essential items in the developer’s kit. In fact these things are still useful if the work you are doing is entirely procedural: the environment can still prompt for function parameters, for example.
Ergo, I think Anon’s poor view of PDT is coloured by his/her poor view of IDEs generally. However, whilst PDT has its problems, I think it is still a decent piece of software. True, it does feel like it could be slimmer, and for PHP users I think there is a lot of Java plug-in stuff that could be trimmed out.
I give the software four stars for features – the only two things I would improve is auto-completion, which sometimes does not pick up references that I think it should; and better code folding, in the style of jEdit (collapsible code blocks, rather than just functions and methods).
Usability loses a star because it’s not the most stable piece of software (though admittedly it’s been a while since it crashed, and my XP machine does desperately need rebuilding). Also the update process has sometimes been a fiddle.
Lastly I’ve not much needed support, so it gets a half-way marker: three stars.
Sometime I will try Netbeans, to see what the PHP support is like in that. But for the time being, PDT is still very usable, and a competitor would have to do something pretty good for me to go to the effort of installing and learning a new package.