When you download and run the standard PDT for example, it is not available.

The answer seems to be: install the Eclipse Java Development Tools.

This may not be the ideal way but if you want to do this through the “Install New Software…” menu, it seems to be the only one.

Just select “Work with: Galileo” (or whatever your Eclipse version is) expand “Programming Languages” and select “Eclipse Java Development”.

After the installation completes you can add Ant as a view.

With every new Zend Studio release (still beta) comes a new PDT version: this time based on Eclipse 3.5 Galileo.

While Eclipse Galileo brings some nice new features and bug-fixes (of which many are not important to PHP developers, but nonetheless) PDT actually impresses the most with PHP 5.3 support: syntax coloring and validation with namespaces awareness. More about this in the release notes.

The best news in my opinion: since the software/plugin/update manager of Eclipse underwent some major refactoring, it’s biggest disadvantage may as well disappear! The only sane way to upgrade from 3.4 (or older) to 3.5 is still: delete your old version and unpack the new one, but lets hope this was the last time…

And last but not least: Mylyn integration got even better (I really need to dedicate a post to this).

Be sure to try the new PDT version!

Eclipse in general is such an well structured IDE: it has so many advanced features to increase your productivity (yes, I just saw a presentation by Mik Kersten about Mylyn). But for some reason, while using PDT 1.0.3, I cannot find a way to upgrade to a new version from within Eclipse. Using the update manager I mean. Isn’t that the most logical place to look?

Also, I wasn’t able to find one decent post about someone explaining how to do this. Because of that, I’m in doubt with myself: am I to stupid to see this or is it really not possible. I cannot imagine the latter is true so…

In the end I just downloaded the PDT 2.0 all-in-one package and unpacked it over my previous installation and everything seems to work fine. Maybe this is the only way to upgrade to a new version? No, never mind, this can’t be true.

More than a year ago I got convinced by a colleague to leave my favorite text editor behind and make the switch to an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for PHP project development.

In my opinion there is only one IDE for PHP: Eclipse. PDT, PHPEclipse, Aptana Studio or Zend Studio are all more or less Eclipse plugins that convert the Eclipse IDE in a PHP development environment. Once you get used to it, your projects will benefit one way or another.

In reality, I still use NotePad++ a lot. It may be best to still link PHP files on your OS to an editor because IDE’s are not made for quick edits.

But, in case your in an upgrade process or just want to improve your set-up, read this article:

Getting Started with Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT)

It could have definitely saved me some time as I took exactly the same steps and use the same plugins. Besides the Zend Debugger that is, as I haven’t found a use for it yet.

I have only one wish: a simplification of the whole Eclipse & plugins project structure. I still don’t understand why I can’t easily upgrade between versions and why so many upgrade options are available. For me, the upgrade process has only proven to be useful for bug fixes and plugin upgrades.

Related post:
How to configure PDT

Read more about it in Federico Cargnelutti’s post on PHP::Impact ( [str Blog] ).

I’ve had a look at the screencast available on the Aptana site and in my opinion the only neat difference to PDT is the “Generate Getters and Setters…” option. As you could suspect, it generates get and set methods based on a selection of existing class properties.

Apart from that, the majority of features shown also exist in PDT.

But it is only version 1.0 so who knows what future versions may bring.

I believe it is supported by Zend and they have derived Zend Studio for Eclipse from it (thus it contains many of the features). Maybe the only feature I’m missing is the code formatter for PHP found in Zend Studio for Eclipse (which formats your code to match, for example, the Zend Framework coding standard).

Anyway, I’ve added these addons which make it even more useful:

• JSEclipse: JavaScript syntax highlighting and code completion.
  Add as remote site: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/jseclipse/autoinstall/site.xml
• Subclipse: Subversion (SVN) client.
  Add as remote site: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x
• HTML Tidy: well known (x)HTML cleanup.
  Download and add as a local site: http://eclipsetidy.sourceforge.net/

Preferences (Window – Preferences) I have adjusted:

• Search for encoding and set everything to UTF-8.
• Search for delimiter and set everything to Unix.
• My favorite: go to PHP – Editor – Save Actions and select Remove trailing whitespace (it does not search for this).

The only downside: Eclipse is written in Java.