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 parison.

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 ments 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?

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 parison.

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 ments 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?

• php
• javascript
• xhtml
• dreamweaver
• zend-studio

• 1 Have you tried Aptana? aptana. – Daniel Wedlund Commented Aug 8, 2009 at 2:45
• 2 Why not Eclipse PDT? Can't beat the price. – jason Commented Aug 8, 2009 at 2:55
• 1 I have tried Aptana, and it takes up nigh on 450MB of RAM on my system so I scrapped it. Dreamweaver takes ~100 for what I tried it with. – Nathan Loding Commented Aug 8, 2009 at 3:26
• the new Aptana takes less!! aptana rocks! – markus Commented Aug 11, 2009 at 20:59
• Aptana 1.5.1 takes about 280MB which is pretty decent for this kind of software. – markus Commented Aug 11, 2009 at 21:00

9 Answers 9

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 pletion for JS / PHP / HTML Version Control (SVN)

and much more..

Download Netbeans

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.

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 pletion inspection and assistance, witch you can check yourself by downloading these two IDE-s and trying to code plete 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 pletion 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.

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 pare...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.

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-plete support for javascript of all editors, but I don't really like the appearance of the editor - looks too 'macish'.

I would remend 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 autoplete, one click access to PHP Manual
• unit testing
• debugging
• profiling
• version control integration

Dreamweaver CS4 for

• HTML coding
• CSS editing
• Other visual design

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.

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 autopletion - really cool!! Saves a ton of time!! Even auto-pletion for your JQuery code and other JS frameworks I think.

Actually Dreamweaver has bee 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..