This was a general story on ComputerWorld.
What caught my attention was the following line:
"Both the Eclipse plug-in and development framework will be offered free. With these moves, Zend seeks to proliferate PHP and leverage opportunities to sell support and training services as well as its products such as the Zend Platform PHP production environment and the Zend Studio IDE. Zend also offers its Zend Core runtime environment for PHP."
From what I understand, if Zend offers an Eclipse plug-in for free, why would they continue to make/sell Zend Studio IDE?
Will the Eclipse plug-in be a syntax highlighter only? If Zend put's their debugger/profiler in Eclipse, there would be no reason to purchase Zend Studio IDE.
To name a few, Eclipse would already have much better:
Project management
CVS
Code inspectors
Intergraded browser
Bookmark support
Find/Replace options
And the most important, which Zend doesn't get through their thick-heads, a much better code editor!
When Zend announces "Zend is joining the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer. Zend is now proposing to lead a project focused on PHP within Eclipse", that really doesn't tell me much. Actually, it starts rumors on what they could potential do with Zend Studio IDE...
Maybe Zend is getting smarter and realized that they cannot produce a high-quality and stable IDE.
That would be the best move of all.
Thanks,
