Migrating to PDT

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Monday, October 1. 2007

In case you haven't noticed, PDT 1.0 has been released. PDT, a.k.a. PHP Development Tools, is the shiny new PHP editor based on Eclipse, on which the successor to the current Zend Studio will be based. Being based on Eclipse, it is very, very powerful. It took a little while for me to get acquainted with the little oddities of the Eclipse platform. One can clearly see that it was originally tailored to fit Java development, and although PHP integration is now pretty good, things sometimes still feel a bit bloated and overly complicated. Having said that, I'm using PDT full-time for all my PHP development now and have kissed the old Zend Studio goodbye. Eclipse brings too many goodies to the table to ignore. For those of you who want to try, here's the major drawbacks that can put you off:

Piss-poor network performance
When you open a project, many many things happen in Eclipse. The project builder starts. The validators unleash their wild dogs on the files, checking for stupid things you will seldomly care about in PHP development. A lot of files will be opened and closed in very short time. When you have a really large project with thousands of files, and your project workspace is on a network share, don't expect your server to cope with the load. At best, expect things to become slow. Very slow.
Frequent slowdowns and out of memory exceptions
Especially when the project builder runs on a very large project, or if you have Subversive installed to update your source files from the repository, or, even worse, if both happens at the same time, things can get ugly. It's bad enough when Eclipse is getting so slow at times that it becomes totally unresponsive, but it gets worse when Eclipse starts throwing Exceptions because there's not enough heap space left.

Note that this goes for Eclipse running with Sun Java 6 on Ubuntu 7.04, on a workstation with 2GB of RAM. And here's what can be done about it:

If you can, use NFS instead of Samba
Hosting the project on NFS shares instead of SMB ones dramatically improved network performance for me. That's not to say that it is really fast now, just a lot faster than with NFS. I wonder if this is due to a borked Samba version on my current Ubuntu, because the Windows clients at the office seem to have fewer problems with network performance (although not what I'd call mindblowingly fast either).
Adjust Java heap space
Regarding the out of memory errors, I have found a forum post that pointed me in the right direction. Using the settings described there, Eclipse no longer runs out of heap space and seems overall more responsive. The wait times for most operations have visibly increased. In case you don't have write permissions to your eclipse.ini, you could also just start Eclipse with the following options (adjust values if have fewer memory):
```
eclipse -vmargs -Xms40m -Xmx1024m
```
UPDATE: Turn off unneccessary validators
Ah, I totally forgot: In the Window/Preferences menu you will find a section called "Validation". There are a lot of validators in here that are activated by default but that you won't ever need for PHP development - such as EJB Validator, JSP Syntax Validator and so on... just turn them off.

Now, where in my directory tree was that class again? Let's just press CRTL-SHIFT-R and find out

Posted by Markus in PHP, Programming at 22:09 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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I've been pretty frustrated by PDT. Here are some of my issues: 1. ftp support. Where is it? How do you enable it? 2. Memory hog. I have "only" 768mb RAM and Eclipse eats that up in no time at all. 3. PDT 1.0 "All-in-one", on the Mac at least, does NOT work out of the box. For instance, debugging won't work until you follow additional specific instructions ( http://preview.tinyurl.com/ynu65x ). Also, the PHP executables that the above instructions install are nowhere to be found with the "All-in-one" PDT install on the Mac. Yes, you can manually set all of this up but it makes the process a pain in the butt. Without debugging, why bother using this? I can do basic code editing/file transfer with any number of faster, lighter applications. I've run into many other issues (auto update indicating there are PDT downloads available but not allowing you to download them, etc.) and overall find it to be quite lacking when compared to Zend Studio 5.5.0. It bugs me because I want to like Eclipse (and have wanted to since waaaay back) but it is such a Java centric, memory hog, configuration heavy pain to set up that I keep dropping it, only to return a few months later to try again. I had high hopes that this "all-in-one" PDT project would be at least close to a drop-in replacement for Zend Studio but it isn't. Not really even close.

#1 Stuart on 2007-10-02 23:27 (Reply)

Stuart, keep in mind that PDT is not meant to be a 100% replacement for Zend Studio - the Zend guys still want to get some bucks out of their product

I've tested the Beta for Zend Studio Neon, the next version that's based on PDT, and it's a lot more polished. You can expect to find most, if not all, of the features you're missing to be in there. This doesn't change the fact that it's still based on Eclipse and so still faces all the problems with memory consumption, network performance etc., though.

#1.1 Markus (Homepage) on 2007-10-02 23:39 (Reply)

Oh I know. I have just been feeling unhappy with my many Eclipse experiences and needed to vent

I soooo want to just love Eclipse as it has so much potential and is open source but it always leaves me perturbed at its quirks, stumbles and incongruities. I'll look forward to Zend Studio Neon... it sounds intriguing!

#1.1.1 Stuart on 2007-10-03 06:50 (Reply)

just drinking another cup of coffee while waiting for my eclipse pdt ...

#2 Soenke Ruempler on 2007-10-04 13:16 (Reply)

NFS did trick in my case , I was earlier working with Samba but got really frustrated with performance. Thanks for the note.

#3 MacCode (Homepage) on 2008-02-13 14:07 (Reply)

Don't use Eclipse over a network share. Check your project files (but not the workspace-level files) into version control, and work locally. All projects paths are relative, and anything you check in on one machine should check out and work fine on another. My wife and I share projects between PCs and Macs this way, and it works great. Plus, version control. Real version control.

#4 Sean on 2008-03-08 02:49 (Reply)

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