IDEs

As a developer, I estimate that my IDE (particularly a web-browser integrated debugger) improves my development ten-fold. Over the past 5 years or so I’ve been using Zend Studio (ZDE) — however, I have been unsatisfied with the Eclipse-based effort that Zend turned to after Zend Studio 5.5. As such, I have continued using Zend Studio 5.5 but have been looking for alternatives as it will not be updated to support new features like Namespaces, Closures and Traits. So far, I have tried Zend Studio for Eclipse/PDT, PHPEclipse (briefly), Komodo IDE and Netbeans. None of them have come close to replacing ZDE except for Netbeans. Below is some requirements and a comparison table for these I have tried so far:

Requirements

• Cross-platform — I have a team that spans Linux (Gentoo/Ubuntu), Windows (XP/Vista), and of course: Mac OS X
• Full-fledged server-side debugger — it must be possible to debug GET and POST requests through both Firefox (2+) and IE (7+) as well as CLI, profiling is a bonus
• Extensive auto-complete support, using phpdoc comments to auto-complete  on objects that are instantiated or returned from functions, static class methods, constants, etc. As well as the standard internal functions/classes/constants etc.
• Revision Control — Should support subversion at least
• Database integration — should be able to connect and query the databases I use
• Good Project Management — should save breakpoints, open files, cursor locations, and not junk up code-directories with meta-data. Multiple open projects is less necessary.
• Bug Tracker integration — specifically, Trac
• Allow custom font themes and keyboard shortcuts — I love me some inconsolata font
  
• Have an attractive, usable UI, that is responsive and customizable
• Should run on a modest machine and use minimal resources
• Is actively being developed
• Is responsive to user concerns/bugs

These requirements do not seem all that difficult, well, perhaps the cross-platform one is — I’d settle for 2 of 3 platforms, so long as one of them is OS X.

Comparison

¹ Java based
² XUL Based (like Firefox)
³ Proprietary Zend Debugger
⁴ Proprietary Zend Debugger and xdebug
⁵ xdebug
⁶ Watches can be created before and during a debug session
⁷ Watches can be created before and during a debug session when using the Zend Debugger, only before when using xdebug
⁸ Watches can only be created prior to the debug session
⁹ Only when using Zend Debugger
¹⁰ No UI for profiling with xdebug, it is simply available as you have it loaded, you must use kcachegrind/wincachegrind to read profiler output
¹¹ Supported Databases vary, however MySQL at least is available
¹² You must manually specify a different meta-data directory when creating the project
¹³ Via the Eclipse Mylyn addon, which has awesome ticket-sensitive contexts — each ticket treated like a project, saving open files etc and loading them when you switch tickets and is in fact the impetus behind this requirement
¹⁴ Buggy, customizations are lost whenever you edit any other settings
¹⁵ Buggy, some can’t be overridden properly — using Cmd+S for delete in the file tree is just STUPID and can’t be changed
¹⁶ Releases are very slow in coming, have consistently missed projected release dates, very little community interaction despite mailing lists.
¹⁷ Stable and development releases are quick in coming, a recent bug I reported was fixed in 2 days, with a nightly available to test that night.
¹⁸ Despite being open source, PDT is not openly developed
¹⁹ While not necessarily forthcoming with all alpha/beta releases, ActiveState do always have public betas and such.