Wow, things have changed in PhpEd land! Being a stalwart Zend IDE user I figured it would be only fair to give you a break-down comparison of the two.

The Editor Itself

What would you think should be the most important, fundamental part of a PHP IDE? Surely it should be the actual editor? I mean yes the debuggers, profilers, source control and in-line help are all nice, but it is the editor that really clinches it for me, and this is where PHPEd wins.

For a start it's not as arse-slow as the Zend one, for which we can most likely blame the Java environment in which ZDE operates. I mean my main work PC is no slouch, we're talking 2GB of Corsair branded RAM and a dual-core top of the range AMD FX processor, all nestled in a top-quality motherboard, next to top-quality components. This thing can shift it, believe me. And yet, somehow, the Zend IDE seems to make everything .. go ... so ... slow. It takes a while to start-up, it takes even longer to handle the screen drawing operations (menus, drop-downs, windows, etc) and the Javaness is evident everywhere. Swap to another application and then back to ZDE and you must .. wait ... again .... Until very recently ZDE on a OS X (which I also run, alongside XP Pro) was the most un-Mac like experience going.

PhpEd at least differs here. When you type, the text keeps up with you. Intellisense doesn't cause a momentary lapse, your variables list updates itself seamlessly as you type, without bothering you about it. You have a lot of control over where you dock the numerous windows on offer too. It just FEELS like a native Windows application, and responds as you'd expect.

So for pure coding speed, one point goes to PhpEd here.

PHP IDE GUI Designers = Extinct?

What both applications lack however, is any sense of design at all. I mean ok ok, icons and presentation aren't everything, not by a long shot. And I can forgive a badly designed application if it actually works, which they do. But it really wouldn't hurt both ZDE and PhpEd to take a leaf from the Adobe / Macromedia / MS books here. You don't see icons in Office that look like they took an 8-year-old a few moments in Windows Paint to create. They understand that 'Office 11' isn't a cutting-edge gui design any more, and hasn't been for several years now.

I'm not asking for an insanely skinned IDE with spurious fading menus, glitzy reflections and the like. I do prefer form over function, but hey - how about a little design aesthetic please? In this round both ZDE and PhpEd loose, because design-wise they are both decidedly average. ZDE has 'skin' support, so you can make it look like the bastard-son of a Java and X-Windows coupling, if you so wish: and PhpEd has 'Office11' skin support, if you like your menu bars grey and chunky. But both of them could do with a good shot of coordinated pixels into their respective non-designed arms. As I develop on Windows Vista a lot (part of my job) the GUI barrier is going to move so far ahead of both IDEs yet again that I do fear they'll be playing visual catch-up for many years to come.

How do they handle my projects?

ZDE works on a 'Project' basis. That is you can collate together various source files, from various locations, together into one project. This is great because features such as method / function insight works on a Project level, not a file one.

PhpEd takes this feature, and then makes it REALLY useful. You can create what is known as a 'Workspace'. Think of this as a collection of 'Projects'. Each Project works in a similar way to ZDE, but the ability to collect these into a single Workspace is an absolutely inspired touch. If, like me, you work on large distributed web sites then this is amazingly useful. You can create a work space that collects together several projects, and then cross-reference everything as you code. To avoid insight conflict you can set one of the Workspace Projects as the 'Active' one. ZDE doesn't offer this, and as a result problems can arise when it tries to calculate which function it should jump to when you right-click a declaration. PhpEd avoids this totally, and as long as functions don't clash within a Project, you can have multiple ones within a Workspace, and just set the Active one as you go. Projects are saved to their own file, and Workspaces to another. So you can easily create a new Workspace that uses several Projects from other Workspaces, and all the settings will be intact and perfectly shared. Bliss.

Trust me, it's harder to explain than it is to use. And it's a REAL time saver. I mean if you're thinking of shelling out hundreds of dollars on a PHP editor anyway, then you surely don't use PHP just to smack up a few custom scripts now and again, you must actually spend a lot of your time coding in PHP - and probably on significantly sized sites, which is why PhpEd Workspaces are a dream.

File Uploading

ZDE has, lets face it, quite poor FTP support. Being able to create a Project where-by you can code, then upload to a test server, give it a test, and then upload to a live server - is not something that is easy to do, not by a long shot. Infact I'd wager it isn't even possible without the use of a 3rd party FTP application. Especially if you have specific requirements regarding FTP access (perhaps via SSL with your own key file).

In PhpEd you can if you wish have it upload the file to your server (live or staging) the moment you CTRL-S it (i.e. save it). It uploads transparently, in the background, and you can watch the FTP log if you so wish, so you can tell when it is up there. This is a real time saver yet again. What is more you have all the options you need open to you when you create the S/FTP connection. You can set different ports, default directories, time offsets, cache settings, compression levels, default file and directory permissions and socks proxies if required. So getting a true secure FTP connection is a breeze. You can also tell PhpEd not to publish certain directories (CVS or .svn for example). What's more the FTP feature works on any file in the Project, so if you need you can use it to throw-up a bunch of graphics too.

HTML Support

If you really need to mix masses of HTML with your PHP (and let's not go into the obvious sins of doing such here) then neither ZDE or PhpEd are going to be much cop, and you're better off with the likes of Dreamweaver. While Dreamweaver might not have the best code editor in the world (it's not terrible, but it's far from perfect), it does have a superb HTML editor, born from the classic and immortal Homesite application. ZDE and PhpEd don't.

PhpEd is intelligent enough to know when you're editing PHP as opposed to HTML or CSS, but it isn't intelligent enough to be able to offer any advanced HTML insight, certainly not in the same way that Dreamweaver can. It's not too bad, the most common tags are well supported, but they are far and few between. It can't handle any form of CSS insight like Dreamweaver can, and it doesn't handle XHTML compliance very well at all (for example it thinks that when creating a <div> tag, it is perfectly valid to then insert an img tag as an attribute of the <div>).

So yes, HTML editing is flawed and a little harder than it should be given the price point. But, the basics are there and if like most people you create your HTML elsewhere anyway, it shouldn't be a massive issue for you. The HTML tools you get to play with from the toolbar are akin to FrontPage Version 1 (think HTML 4), clicking the BODY tag icon for example gives you a window allowing you to set the 'bgcolor' among other, very out-dated, things. ZDE is no different in this department and offers no more or less HTML editing support than PhpEd does.

This is a shame because HTML/CSS is such an intrinsic part of probably 99% of the work PHP developers do. And even if you don't mix your code and HTML, you still don't always want to have to be running two applications just to work on the one site. PhpEd and ZDE: must try harder.

Source Control

ZDE supports CVS and Subversion, natively, from the menus within the main editor. PhpEd only supports CVS natively, which is a crying shame - as everyone I know uses Subversion these days. You CAN hack svn support into PhpEd, via some judicious use of custom settings, but it should be included out of the box - and the lack of it renders the wonderful S/FTP support harder to use if you need to swap elsewhere to commit a file before uploading.

Debuggers

ZDE uses the Zend Debugger system, which to be fair to Zend isn't half bad at all. You get all of the usual controls, and it is well integrated into the IDE. It does fall down in the ease-of-use department when you wish to remote-debug, but it still all generally works. PhpEd uses the DBG debugger, which is also available separately from the NuSphere web site. It is an extremely powerful debugger to say the least, and everything you could hope for is included. From line-by-line step through, to variable inspection, conditional break points and the superb execution traceback. You won't be left wanting for anything here. The integration with PhpEd itself is handled well, and if you can get it configured to remote debug your servers, it's something of a dream come true. There is a DBG browser toolbar, much like for ZDE, to speed things up in testing - but, again like the ZDE version, it only works in Internet Explorer.

Other Tools

I cannot cover everything PhpEd does. That would be pointless (just get the free 30-day trial), but I will mention a few more areas I really love.

The built-in Terminal support - This is truly great. You can create Telnet/SSH connections, and just open them up next to your code so they are sat there in a tab at the top of the IDE. I mean I know you can run PuTTY alongside ZDE, but this saves the need to do that. Instead you can have your code in one tab and a complete secure SSH session to your server next to it, or you could even split them up vertically. Why do I find this useful? Again it's about saving time. There's no need to even run PuTTY, I can just be there, connected to as many of my servers as I like, while working on scripts that are running live on them. For debugging command-line scripts this really comes into its element.

Useful Plugins - PhpEd comes with a number of pre-configured applications, most of which are worth actually having. Things like HTML Tidy, HTML Validator, Smarty Template highlighting, the NuSOAP Wizard and PHP documentor, they all add to the overall usefulness of the package.

PHP 5.2

ZDE doesn't currently support PHP 5.2. Only 5.1 is supported, although beta 5 of ZDE 5 has PHP 5.2 support if you wish to risk working with a beta version editor. PhpEd supports 5.2 natively.

It's not perfect though

There are a few small niggles I have with PhpEd. The most annoying is the way it cannot tell if you are already working within a pair of quotes. For example if you have the following:

<img src="wibble.gif" />

If you then delete the first quote perhaps by re-typing the image name, it will insert two sets of quotes leaving you with:

<img src="dr"ibble.gif" />

Which are you can appreciate isn't too useful, as you then need to delete the extra quote. This might sound like a small problem, but you'd be amazed the number of times it causes a problem while coding (because it happens within PHP code too, with ' and " marks).

Also, if you are working in a particularly large Workspace, with a number of Projects, each with a lot of files, it can take a while to open the Workspace up, as PhpEd scans every single file in every Project. Why it can't remember whatever it scans for, and cache it somewhere, I don't know. It can surely tell if you've worked on the Workspace since it last cached it, but I guess that would stop it being able to tell if the files in the Workspace had been changed from outside of PhpEd. Even so, it'd be a nice option. We store all of our work files on a fully RAIDed development box, and access them across the network, which adds to the 'scanning' lag a little more than it should, so this might be an isolated case.

PhpEd doesn't support code folding, which is really annoying. To be able to fold a large function or class would make file navigation a lot easier. ZDE doesn't support this either, but apparently it's part of the 5.5 beta release.

Worth the money?

Well that's relative, isn't it. All I will say is this - if you are in the market to buy a professional-grade PHP editor, then don't automatically assume it has to be Zend Studio. For a start they are exactly the same price, and come with the same support contract. Sure Zend has the big name behind it, but right now it simply isn't the best PHP IDE out there at this level. That crown has to sit on PhpEd's head. Perhaps ZDE 5.5 will change this, but it'd have to be one big-ass overhaul to do so, and it just doesn't look like being that at the moment.