Zend - What PHP Developers Think of Zend Studio - Real User Reviews
Zend is one of the most popular IDE's for PHP Developers, many developers use it, many do not.
Find out what real users think about Zend Studio (in the user reviews below) and make up your own mind.
Real user reviews
This is one of the better editors out there - but still not perfect yet.
There are some annoyances...
- no tag editor : well, it does have a code completion system, so it can be done,
but it is not as good as Dreamweaver, for example.
- the FTP system is clumsy. It adds the FTP sites into your system namespaces. It works - but I do not like it.
- slow to load, slow to use : this is probably the biggest problem in daily use.
Good points
- a lot of powerful (if rarely used ) stuff. Ie links to subversion, etc.
- good code formatter
- extremely easy to read font in editor
- end bracket highlighting
from the php-editors.com forums
I use Zend Studio every day. It's not very well put together. It should be project based. You mention that you have to define a global setting for the php version - that should be defined by the current project you have open or by the project the current file belongs to. The same goes for ftp servers - they're all defined globally - that should be defined within the scope of the project.
The UI sucks in general because you can't hide unused toolbars. Everything is always in the way.
Yes, it's a java app and it's reasonably fast, but it always has choke points. It'll freeze up and you can't do anything for a minute while it does whatever it thinks needs doing. This sucks big time because it almost always comes while writing code - like it decides to rebuild the code completion database in the middle of working. It blocks the whole UI and is extremely irritating. Because of that, I've taken to using vim more than ZS.
It's pretty good, but there's a lot of room for improvement. Keep in mind that it's a commercial app and you don't get even minor version updates without a support contract. If there's a serious bug, chip up the cash to get the next minor release (which are rare) or the next major release.
from Linux.com user comments
I have been using Zend Studio since the 3.5 days and although it has not always been perfect, I am going to have to say it is still the best solution for PHP development.
I have seen a lot of posts complaining about slowness and incompatabilities, and I too have even complained.......
from Zend Forums
I disagree completely. Zend Studio is very disappointing in many respects. First and foremost the poor overall performance of the product is unlike anything I have seen in modern computing. It's kinda like the old days when you sat and waited for an internet page to load over a 28.8 modem. Simply not viable. What's more, the fact that Zend completely ignores these problems is a REAL problem seeing as I have paid several hundred $ for the product. Simply not good enough.
And finally, there is a far superior product: nusphere's PHPEd.
from Zend Forums
Zend Studio has some very nice features like code completion for your own classes, project setup,
SVN integration & extended debug options. But...
after I've tried the v.5.2 trial for one week I gave up because of some unacceptable problems:
- It crashes very often. It simply suddenly dies on Windows XP, and if you had things unsaved you lose them. Unacceptable.
- After you have done a find & replace action, you can't go back.
It simply moves the cursor over the screen when you press CTRL+Z, without undoing anything. Unacceptable.
thanks for the great site.
-- mark
from the php-editors.com forums
In regards to people compaining that ZDE is slow, I have had the same troubles.
But as soon as I turned off the option "Use OS Look and Feel", every thing became responsive and useable,
and the auto complete became lightning fast.
Hope this may help you.
from the php-editors.com forums
It's far from being the best and it's far from being robust.
But it is the most marketed, and the most shamelessly marketed for certain.
The editor is buggy, lacking features, and it's been so for 2 years now.
Being written in java does not help at all. There are performance issues as well.
Do yourself a favor and look around, don't buy this one because the website looks to be professional!
I have swithced to nuSphere phpEd just recently and I'm very happy with this latest choice.
from the php-editors.com forums
I tried out the demo, and really don't see how any OS X user could like the program.
The interface is so clunky, it made me feel like I was on windows again, and that is a very bad thing for Mac software to do.
It's also Java, and I'm not really that big on Java desktop applications on OS X.
Maybe if they take the time to develop a version for OS X, it would be better,
but they clearly did not develop the OS X version of Zend Studio with OS X users in mind.
from PHPBuilder Forums
Overview: Many people like the features available from Zend Studio and feel driven to this product because they have a large online presence and close links with PHP.
But most people prefer to use an IDE which is native to their platform (not built using Java), the main reasons seem to be with speed and memory issues. However,
developers coming from a Java background tend to accept these problems and are very happy with Zend. As with any IDE on the market, people will always go with the tools which feels right for them.
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