ISO advice: choosing an open-source IDE
I want to use an IDE for Drupal development. From my experience with other languages, I know that it will speed up my work tremendously.
I bought a copy of Zend Studio on the recommendation of an experienced Drupal developer I spoke with, but I will need to do my work on several different computers over the next few months, and I can't justify paying several hundred dollars apiece for licenses to use Zend Studio on all of them.
The Drupal documentation's Development tools page mentions several open source IDE's: Bluefish Editor, several flavors of Eclipse, and Geany. I think that one of these would probably be better suited to my needs.
If you've had experience using an open-source IDE for Drupal development, would you please share it? Would you recommend the one you're using, or some other?
At this point my needs are fairly basic: a simple, reliable PHP debugger and a syntax-aware editor. Easy setup, or at least clear instructions, would be a major advantage. (That has proved to be a problem area with Zend Studio.) Additional features like structured HTML display, stylesheet editing, etc. would be nice, but I have adequate tools for these purposes now, and I am content with them.
My environment is: Windows XP; Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.5, Drupal 6.2.
Eclipse and debugging
As far as I know, Eclipse is the only open-source IDE capable of debugging a Drupal session :
http://drupal.org/node/157609
This would be the deciding factor for me :P
Trouble setting up Eclipse
I'm trying to setup Eclipse according to the instructions you cited, and I'm having difficulty with it. I have started a new topic to address this, Difficulty setting up a project for debugging in Eclipse IDE.
Zend Studio Licensing policy.
Hi.
Zend Studio licenses are floating, it means that you can install the Studio on as many boxes you want and as long as the Studio is not actually up and running on all of them on the same time - you can use it.
This is of course true if you bought 1 license, if you buy X licenses, you can run X instances of Studio without any issues.
It's ambiguous about that
I've read the license, and it's ambiguous about that. It says that , and that , but it also speaks throughout of not or I'd need to ask Zend what their intentions are before installing the software on a second computer, and there isn't time for that.
In any case, the limitation to makes it moot. Neither of the computers on which I want to install the program is under my sole control and use. I could install it so that it could only be used under my account, but the license doesn't allow for that. Again, Zend might say it's okay if I asked them, but there isn't time.
I'm going to have to go with Eclipse.
Aptana Is ok
I've used aptana (http://www.aptana.com/) studio community edition for quite a while. I find it works fine although I do not use the debugger too much. Except for the occasional nasty issue with someone else's code, I've never found IDE based debugging to helpful in any language. Good unit test cases and well designed error/exception handling go a long way toward limiting my need for a debugger.
beren erchamion
http://tarnaeluin.wordpress.com/
I've never found IDE based
My experience has been different, but right now I'm facing a difficult problem without the aid of a debugger, so perhaps you can give me some advice.
I'm trying to debug a hook_form_submit() callback. Print statements in this callback are not producing any output in the page or the page source. (At first I thought the callback was not getting called, I found that it is by inserting a call to a nonexistent function and getting a runtime error.)
How do you debug in a situation like this? The callback is essentially a black box; anything that I cannot deduce by observing its behavior is unknowable.
I've never found IDE based
The above is called "displaying your own ignorance." (You seem to think a "debugger" has to do with catching bugs). An entire world opens up when you have the ability to actually STEP THROUGH the execution of code, especially when looking at an OS-level system. Anything else is stabbing in the dark.