Firstly – I passed my Zend PHP5 Certification exam yesterday (\o/). I’ve been thinking of taking the exam for some time, and finally got round to it when my employer offered to pay for the test. It was rather more difficult than I expected – but there were very few questions that required arcane knowledge of the order of arguments to PHP functions (which I use the manual and Zend Studio’s auto-complete for). It does focus quite a lot on SOAP and webservices, but the php|arch certification guide I bought warned me about that.

Secondly, I’ve given up with Zend Studio Neon – it has a huge amount of useful stuff that Eclipse PDT doesn’t – like get/setter generation, code formatting, PHPUnit support, and the other stuff listed here. However – I just can’t get on with the ‘project’ system. All I want is to be able to browse the file system in the LHS pane – and that doesn’t seem to be something its willing to let me do. I don’t want to individually add files & folders to my project, or manage include paths, or have .kpf files dotted around that I have to tell subversion to ignore. So I’m back to Zend Studio 5.5 pro, which doesn’t have this annoyance. I normally on windows with with a VM or separate development hardware sharing my home directory through samba and then mapping that as a drive in Windows. I then browse this mapped network drive with my editor/IDE. If anyone knows how to get this to work in PDT or Neon (or Komodo, which I had the same issue with) I’d love to hear from you.

Finally, because I’m not above a bit of gratuitous plugging, in an effort to win a book, and because I needed a third Zend related topic for this post. If you haven’t listened to PHP Abstract yet, then you might want to add it to your list of things to listen to – its worth it alone for Cal Evans‘ cheesy intro and post script. The latest episode is an interview Cal did with Sean Coates of php|architect (and one of the hosts of the other php podcast). PHP Abstract is much more frequent than the other podcast, and with considerably less rambling – each episode lasts about 10 minutes and is given by a range of people from the PHP community. Cal’s own ‘How to kill a software project’ is very funny.

This new beta is Zend Studio for Eclipse (codename Neon), so I’m not sure how different it will be to PDT (or the vanilla Zend Studio for that matter) but I figure its worth a look.

and if anyone has any recommendations for any other (win32 or linux) IDEs that are worth trialling, I’d love to hear from you.