[news.eclipse.tools.pdt] Re: aptana php support

[Exception e <exceptione@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Roy,

Thanks for following up. Note that my observation was in no way a rant, 
I am actually a pdt enthusiast. The only thing is that I am not a 
fanboy/fool, I always keep a critical eye on things I love.

In fact I am very gratefull with a professional IDE that comes for free. 
I am Dutch so you know what that means to me. Also, I've been using the 
old Zend Studio. That product was completely broken in comparison with 
today's PDT.

> Although I usually ignore posts like this in the PDT newsgroup, this 
> time I couldn't help it as this boosts my passion to get PDT better and 
> prove that open source based products are better than other 
> closed-source based commercial products.
>
> So relating to the comparison you guys did I want to mention:
>
> 1. Eclipse is an open-source project, its ecosystem is wonderful, ideas 
> are accepted and declined by many people, new directions are 
> investigated every day, people raise their thoughts to the public 
> through wiki and bugzilla systems, there are several extensions on top 
> of PDT as we open our API so that other companies can reuse it. We enjoy 
> from tens of people who actively download the nightly bundle and alert 
> us on any stupid thing we do, and that is just the beginning since this 
> project is 3 years old and the list can be go much longer. Aptana 
> doesn't have this reach ecosystem.


To be honest, this remarks embarrases me a little. I would have thought 
that you know your competitor by heart! Aptana *is* open source. 
Actually, Aptana does a lot in teaching their clients to use their api 
in order to create new plugins. You can see it yourselves here: 
http://www.aptana.com/dev/index.php/Main_Page#source
Aptana can be used as a plugin in eclipse itselves.


> 2. Most of Eclipse PDT developers are Zend employees - there are bad 
> things and good things regarding this. But the most important thing is 
> that we live in THE PHP company which knows what best for PHP developers 
> as we in contact with the community and other enterprise customers. 
> Aptana doesn't have this notion and will not "gain" it in the next future.

I can imagine that being a Zend employee helps in implementing a better 
php ide than the competitor. PHP support in Aptana is _just a plugin_, 
and for a long period php support in Aptana was minimal. I mean: no type 
inference, class completion and so forth. The Zend advantage have indeed 
been true for a long period. You're right.
As I understand from the bugs, the fora, the documentation and the demos 
 aptana's php plugin is on par with that from pdt.

- Syntax higlighting.
	In Aptana this is more fine grained.
- Code completion (templates, classes, php libraries, php 
functions). 			The same
- Debugging. [Zend/ XDebug].
	The same, although remote debugging is experimental in aptana according 
to the docs.
- manual
	The same

In general aptana gives you some more control on individual options, but 
the main features are roughly the same.

> 3. There are many problems with JavaScript source editing and user 
> experience with Eclipse, all are under the Web Tools responsibility and 
> will be hopefully handled in next versions. From my experience if 
> something is wrong in an open source project - someone will be pissed 
> off and fix it! this is not the case in the Aptana editor case (What you 
> see is what you get).

I don't know if there are a lot of user contributions the code. I fear 
the situation is the same as for pdt.
But everyone is free to contribute code or fill in bug reports.

> 4. I don't want to be part of the nasty comparison between PDT and 
> Aptana but IMHO Aptana introduces lousy features, if this screencast 
> shows their best features I am really not concerned.

What feature didn't you like?

> So I want to conclude - if you have *any specific issue* that might help 
> us improve Eclipse PDT - just say it! we consider any request and we do 
> our best to implement it, you can ask users who give us feedback in a 
> daily basis and put a thought in our next generation product - Eclipse 
> PDT 2.0/2.1. If you want to hassle us - that's fine! we enjoy reading it 
> in the small and late hours we spend on Eclipse PDT development ;)

I surely don't want to hassle you. To reassure you: I love pdt and have 
no links with Aptana. I believe the pdt team to be a good and 
professional team, comparable to those from other professional eclipse 
projects! In my previous remark I only wanted to express that the aptana 
folks are mad ide builders. They move incredibly fast, and I don't 
understand how they do that. Sorry if you misunderstood my remarks as a 
reproach.


New feature requests? I have some ideas:

- extensive refactoring. extract method, surround try cath and so forth

- database completion: auto complete fields and table names in strings 
and Zend_DB_Select. Netbeans has implemented database completion, but i 
don't know how this works.

- ability to automatically set the type of $this to a predefined class 
(e.g. Zend_View) for certain types of files. This would be a project 
configuration option.

- (minor) option to the let the formatter respect your max line width 
setting. Consequenses:
	* Insert newlines in docblocks while typing
	* auto formatting ensures characters won't cross the limit

- Ability to insert docblocks while typing, instead of having to 
right-click an element in Outline view

- Auto completion in Doc Block.

> Exception e wrote:
>
> > hertzel schreef:
> > > my question is it is even close?
> > close to what?
>
> > If I look at the screencasts, I think their php-plugin have slightly 
> > surpassed pdt . Combined with their stronger support for html, js, css 
> > and so forth they are an enormous threat to pdt. Aptana moves 
> > incredibly fast. Almost each month they add a new 
> > library/plugin/language.
> > But I don't know how stable it is.
>
> > I simply don't understand why they can build such huge things (aptana 
> > cloud anyone?) with a modest team, while simple features in phpeclipse 
> > and pdt, whose teams only focus on php, takes years to come.
> > Check out aptana.com and look at their documentation, products, 
> > screencasts, tutorials, and bug system: they must use some magic in 
> > their office. I don't mean that pdt is particularly slowâI don't have 
> > enough insight to judge upon thatâbut the competitor is apparently at 
> > least 4 times stronger.
>
> > I think it will be a matter of a few months before support for php 
> > frameworks will arrive in aptana.
> > The next competitive advantage in the php-IDE is php 5.3 /6.0 support. 
> > I am curious who will be the first.