Mar
19
Disappointed with Zend
March 19, 2009 - 2:10pm
Every few months as I sit at my desk and code away, I can't help but wonder to myself, "Is there anything better out there?" I'm not being metaphysical or introspective -- I'm talking about my integrated development environment (IDE). Most coders I've met are the same way: we find a tool we like, use it for a while, but usually end up wanting something more or different. Perhaps discontent is a core part of human nature, but every few months I go looking for better tools.
I've been happily using Zend Studio for Eclipse (ZSE) for just over a year now. I had loved Eclipse + PHPEclipse for a long while before moving on to Eclipse + PDT, and had finally paid for ZSE to get a few extra features, support, and install packages that didn't take me hours to assemble and install. I've grown to know and understand Eclipse well, which is part of why I've been using Eclipse in one form or another for about 4 years now.
In truth, I was fine using ZSE for now. Work is keeping me busy, there is plenty to do at our new house... honestly, I didn't care to spend time looking into another solution for my daily-use PHP IDE. Then my ZSE license expired, and while I can still use ZSE, I cannot get any updates or bug fixes until I pay Zend's extortion fee of $200.
Let me be clear: I understand and accept paying recurring licensing fees. Except that in a year, Zend has only managed two updates that pass for anything more than the most minor bug fixes. And $200 for yearly maintenance for a product I bought for $300 a year ago (they were running a promo) just seems too high.
If Zend was offering me some great new feature, or even fixes to all of the mild annoying bugs that run a little rampant through ZSE -- I'd pay the fee! Yes, even $200! However, given the current state of ZSE and the paucity of updates from Zend, I'd have to strongly consider even putting $100 toward ZSE at this point.
Hi Josh,
We had a few growing pains in the process of migrating to Eclipse. While it let us build a much better product we just did not really understand the complexities of getting Eclipse updates out quickly. The good news is that we learned a lot in the last year and are taking our experiances working on PDT in the open source community and applying it to the inernal Stduio development processes.
We have moved to a much more iterative process internally. We are running nightly builds and and QA tests. This will enable us in the future to roll out bug fixes much more quickly than we Ever did before. We are setting an internal target of monthly bug fix releases. If you look at our progress over the last couple of months we released 6.1.0 followed fairly quickly by 6.1.1. We are just about to to release a new update and set of bug fixes (6.1.2). So while we're not quite monthly yet we're getting there.
We are also in the process of working on a major update to Studio to address a couple of key areas. First is stability and overall performance, much of this comes from updating Studio to use PDT 2.0 (the open source foundation of Studio) but there are also changes to our internals. Second, we are looking at simplifying the out of the box experience for people. We want the start up time for new users and new projects to be as close to zero as possible. We home to have this in beta before too long.
If you have any further comments or question please fee free to contact me. Use my first name at zend.com.
Kent,
Thanks for the response. I like Eclipse and I like ZSE. I'll be keeping an eye on Zend.
A word to the wise: NuSphere has a great product in PhpED -- be sure your product is just as, if not more, stable and feature rich. As it stands right now, NuSphere might be getting my money instead of Zend... but there's always the next time I go searching for a new tool! :)
Post new comment