Which PHP devel environment to use on AMD64 ?

That's it, I quit, I'm throwing Zend IDE in the bin, I almost considered paying for it after trialing it, until I moved to AMD64 platform, I'm sure the IDE itself is not to blame, but rather Java's stupid problems adopting 64bit architecture (can someone remind me what the point of java was in the first place?)

Yes, I've tried Zend IDE 5.5.1 for x64 and it still crashed or got other errors - no I dont care about playing with the JRE libraries, I'm payed to develop PHP web-apps not mess around with Java.

And yes i'm over Zend eating over 300MB of my precious RAM todo it's job.

To be honest, there is nothing new in Zend IDE, it is no leap in software development since Watcom 10 came out somewhere in the mid the late 90's and we were developing C apps under DOS/4GW extenders (hello doom!)

Watcom 10 from the 90s, Nothing new in Zend IDE that wasnt available to programmers back in 1996!

But I digress, heres pretty much what anyone looking to use an IDE with an integrated debugger is looking for

- Breakpoint
- Conditional breakpoints
- Variables inspection/modification
- Some text handies like auto-completion
- Good integration with your desktop (*ANY* Java based application fails under linux with this because it uses its own Java widgets to browse your filesystem)

Zend IDE fails on that last point pretty hard, the text-handies are just passable, conditional breakpoints are messy at best but I have been able to get simple ones to work.

So what are the options for native Linux IDE's?

I think theres two routes if you are looking for an IDE under Linux, either you use xDebug or Zend protocol.

Apprently Zend have opened their debug protocol so you would expect their to be a plethora of debuggers taking up this opportunity to get their product onto the desktop of the developers from one of the worlds most popular web scripting languages.

And xDebug is like using vim and gdb - i'm just not so keen on that these days.

you would be very wrong

Here's what I've found.

Zend IDE 5.5.1
- Good basic text completion
- Average to Fair breakpoint/variable inspections etc
- Comes shipped with a SVN binary that is NOT SSL enabled (you cant commit to https:// style repo's)
- It is SLOW
- It consumes a lot of RAM
- It is java based

KDevelop 3.3.9
- No support for Zend debug protocol
- Poor to no support for text completion for PHP projects

Quanta Plus Web Dev Env.
Quanta boasts a large set of resources / plugins however the IDE is still in tune for oldschool HTML with embedded PHP editing.

- No support for Zend debug protocol
- Poor to no support for text completion for PHP projects

Eclipse with PDT
Dont even get me started on yet another Java based IDE, I have used eclipse extensively in the past, but i was just never impressed.
As it is based on Java it suffers from the same old Java-esque problems, it becomes slow the more plugins you add, the memory usage is a total blow out, and you can forget reliability on a 64bit platform.

Rumor has it this PDT plugin should let you talk to Zend's PHP debugger library/protocol seamlessly but for all the "Exit error 13" and various pages of java shitting itself (ie stack/trace calls) I'm just not impressed.

xDebug with VIM
Apparently this just works, and it works well.
Check the above link on the 2bits.com site to illustrate it, this makes me think, maybe kdevelop/kate etc could use xDebug?
Sorry mate You would be wrong Google search reveals no such connection between kdevelop and xdebug...

Komodo IDE with xDebug integration
This actually sounds pretty good too! It's a *real* shame Komodo is compiled against the archiac GTK2 libraries, would be fantastic if it was built for Qt or wxWidgets

Theres a few UI glitches like the edges of menu options not having a border etc, so the whole experience feels a bit naf, and i'm still yet to get break points to work, but i'll report back, this could be the way forward.

So what is going on?

I'm not sure! One of the web's most prolific scripting languages doesnt have debugger/IDE coverage on the platform it has thrived under, maybe most PHP coders are 'hacks' ? maybe no one uses 64bit architecture?

Sounds like the real options are those that implement xDebug's protocol