PHP

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