I have been evaluating Zend Studio 5 beta 2 for my many PHP related projects. It contains the things I like about the older versions, and also some of the things that I dislike. I like the features it contains. The auto suggest feature is nice, but sometimes it delays my typing as it is loading. Zend Studio, written in Java, can be quite a memory hog. Sometimes it causes the Java process to consume almost 200M RAM. I think that's a bit much for an IDE. Then oddly, it can drop down to only a few megabytes. Also, the file open dialog box is annoying. It keeps putting me in the My Documents directory, which is not where my web projects are located. Despite it's performance shortcomings, I will continue to use Zend Studio, while keeping an eye out for their new Eclipse based IDE.

I got the new Zend Studio 4 Beta, and have been using it to work on some websites. It seems faster than 3.5, and it has SQL integration. I poked around my databases for a little while.

One thing that bugs me is the open/save dialog box. I wish it used the standard open/save dialog box with the places bar. I use Folder View to put a shortcut to my web server directory in that dialog box.

Also, code folding would be nice.

I just opened the code snippets for the first time. It is updating my snippets because it said they are more than a month old. It seems to be downloading a lot of stuff.

The snippets are neat. I'll look into those later.

I can't wait until PHP 5 is final. I want to start making all my code more object oriented.

I bought this book years ago before there was a PHP 4. It sat around unused for a long time, but once I started learning from this book, PHP has become one of my favorite programming languages. The book, written by Leon Atkinson, was the source of the base code for my message bboard system.