My Current Opinion of Zend

getDizzle

I posted earlier on this IDE and was very positive about it. I write very complex and large OO PHP projects and really loved the integration of code completion of my own custom methods. Well, after using it for about 3 weeks I experienced about 100+ crashes. The integrated FTP simply decides it's going to "blank" a remote file when it feels like it and completey crash your entire PC. (Windows 2k and XP Pro).

This software is the buggiest piece of garbage ever written. After consulting with some of their developers I am convinced they don't have a clue in the world how to solve this issue. They made the fundamental mistake of writing this application largely in Java, and as a result, it is a buggy, bloated piece of shyte.

Will someone out there please take the ideas Zend has and write something that is stable!!! The features Zend has are perfect, it is unfortunate they failed miserably in implementation. If you feel like flushing $200+ US Dollars down the comode, by all means purchase this product.

That is my final review of this absolute disgrace to the PHP IDE community.

Tracer

I use zend studio 2.6 quite a bit....

Never crashes (win 2000/NT4 boxes)...even use it on my laptop with no problems.

I do wish they wrote it in C though... The integration of the file manager is "sketchy", It's a huge resource hog on a windows machine, and there is a bug in the filesharing (if another program such as apache opens a php file your editing it does some funky stuff)

Overall I have found it to be pretty solid though.....Maybe you need more mem or your box? All mu boxes are 256MB+

jstarkey

I had problems with 2.5, but not 2.6. In talking to Zev, most of the crashes were due to a Java issue that's been fixed and implemented in 2.6. It's been running great now. I'm using Linux/Gnome on a Thinkpad 1.9 gig with 796 megs of RAM..

I've used the FTP feature a few times and it's working fine now as well, where I had issues in 2.5.

Dizzle, which version are you using?

getDizzle

Just a bit of information, a developer with Zend told me this was a confirmed bug and would be fixed in a later release. This bug is present in the latest release, 2.6.1. It has been duplicated on 2 different P4 1.7GHZ each with a gig of RAM and an Athlon XP 1700 with 512 RAM. The two pentiums are running Win2k and the Athlon is running WinXP Pro.

Randomly when using "control-s" to save a remote file the program appears to not respond. If you have command line on the remote linux server you'll see the file completely wiped out. And the xfer log will show that a 0 byte file was uploaded. (We use our own CVS so we never lost any data, thankfully). At this time the program needs to be manually restarted with Task Manager, and often times a full reboot is needed.

I provided all possible feedback to Zend and have communicated with their staff to try to help them solve this issue. So I'm not simply complaining, I'm also doing everything possible to help them fix this because, otherwise, I feel this is a fantastic program for someone writing large enterprise level PHP applications.

I'm jealous that others do not see this problem, but I'm also interested to know if you use the remote save feature as exclusively as I do? I save my file sometimes multiple times per few minutes when I'm debugging something.

jstarkey

Dizzle, I have a review copy here and I used it about 20 hours this weekend. 14 straight hours yesterday. I normally do everything over vi and ssh, live, so I almost have to use the ctrl-s, just to avoid the withdrawal lol. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if I hit ctrl-s 1000 times yesterday. And a good amount of them were several times per minute, like you.

Anyway, I didn't have one issue with 2.6 yesterday. And definitely not the same problem you're having.

I still haven't played with the debugging though. Are you using the debugger when you have the issue? Or were you referring to debugging manually?

Anyway, I don't doubt your issue. We all know how crazy bugs can be at times. But at least it is an obscure issue and not an oblivious oversight. I think they'll have it fixed soon.

jcs

Don't blame java for the crashes. It's more an issue of good programming. Build 24x7 Java programs which never crashed.

danielson2k

I use Zend 2.6 for pretty much all of my PHP (especially large projects). The code completion saves loads of time (and typos) and the hilighting of matching "}" and "(" is a life saver.

The only problems I have with it (on XP) are that it tends to be a little slow and doesnt like running alongside apps like Photoshop and Flash.

largo

getDizzle,

I too had many problems with 2.5 as all work is done remotely. Most of them were ftp time out related. The program had a great deal of difficulty trying to re-establish connections. Quite often it would simply refuse refresh and "Disconnect / Connect" led to FTP Error.

This was using 2.5 on debian linux.

2.6.0 was problematic too. I couldn't browse remote folders... the program would simply refuse to browse certain directories while going deeper in other dirs and showing files perfectly...

I recently updated to 2.6.1 and the problems have all but disappeared. This is all of course on linux.

On windows Homesite did to me what Z-Studio is doing to you. On ftp time-outs when saving files, the program would sometimes crash while starting the upload of the file being saved. This resulted in a truncated file.

Hope Zend can help solve your issue, the IDE is quite fantastic... if only it "was" in c.

P.S: Have you given NuSphere's PHPEd a shot?

-m.

getDizzle

Hmm, sorry I haven't updated this in a while. The problems are very random and usually seldom so I've just stuck with it just because I can't do without the project inspector for my classes. Trying to parse through 2000 lines of code to find the argument for a class I wrote 6 months ago is simply not fun. No other editor autocompletes included classes/functions as accurately as Zend.

To answer a question here, yes, I have tried Nusphere and was not impressed. I think it's just the fact that Zend's look & feel has spoiled me.

As far as the crashes, I can keep them under control if I'm patient. My instinct is to control-s and alt-tab as quickly as possible to my browser to check my update. If I wait half a second for the save to complete before alt tabbing it seems to reduce the crashing. I think the crashing is caused when Zend can't connect to the FTP server during a save, it simply doesn't deal well with it and crashes.

Oh, for the java comment, yeah I was off base there. I just noticed that my most unstalbe programs (Zend, Navicat, Eclipse (the java editor heh)) are all written largely in Java. So, to educate myself I dropped 80 clams on Dietel's "Java How to Program" book and dove in. Have to say I now love Java and if I can clear the mental hurdle of event handling I can start writing some windows apps. It's a real nice change from writing for the web.

Welp, that's it for now. Yes it still crashes but I've been able to reduce it and still happily use Zend 60 hours/week. Thanks for all the feedback!

lordecax

well i'm using Zend 2.6 runing in a XP Pro and VS 2003 crash more times per second that Zend and all my developed files are in a server (P III 450Mhz 360Mb) runing win 2003 and apache 1.XXX and all works fine when using PHP Apache MySql and Zend... when I'm use Microsoft development tools all system go down...

Now... can you understend that and say again that Zend is trash?! 😃

jstarkey

I'm using Studio daily now and no crashes with the exception of one server I work with. The code is so trashed I can't enter the site as a project until I clean it up. (which I'm sure is going to take a year). I just use the site from the filesystem tab, rather than the project and all is fine.

There's also one other issue: when the app DOES crash, you need to chmod the /usr/local/Zend/config and /usr/local/Zend/logs directorys.

Other than that, it's working perfectly for me on Linux.

jonnyblaze_t14

i've used studio 2.6 since this version came out. i'm extremely ctrl-s happy, and i'm about 15,000 lines of code into this site and haven't had one crash yet. my box is xp pro, my web host runs redhad 7.2. however, i don't use the debugger

after reading this post, one thing i wish it would do is keep a local cache of the files i work on, just incase.. and definately have a windows native version. i've never seen anything at this level written in java that works anywhere near as good as a native version would.

jayant

I got chance to use Zend Studio 2.5 (with server) @ a company (was freeelancing for them) for about 45 days.
I somehow didn't succeed to use the debugger. It wasn't working the way I expected it to. Maybe it worked that way only or maybe I didn't use it properly.