Zend Studio now free for Zend Certified Engineers
Just got the very good news that Zen Studio ($299) is now free for Zend Certified Engineers. Neat! I’ve been wanting to try it out for a while, but wasn’t willing to spend $299 for it.
Zend Studio is built on Eclipse (which is free for everybody), so it has a very small learning curve for those already familiar with Eclipse. My initial impression is that it is just an easier to use version of Eclipse, with more robust PHP tools than the free Eclipse PDT gives you.
I ran into a few quirks while using it that took a moment to figure out:
- By default, Zend Studio assumes you are using PHP 5.1/5.2. With the massive speed improvements and new functionality added in 5.3, I don’t know of anyone that chooses to use 5.1/5.2. Seems like a weird default option to set, and it caused my code to show a whole pile of errors that didn’t really exist.
- By default, Zend Studio uses PHP 5.2.14 to debug. Again, a really weird default.
Anyways, I’ll be playing around with it on my next website-of-the-month. Any tips from those already using it would be greatly appreciated!