Three pieces of zend news today:
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.
