Richard Sumilang’s Blog

If your one of those people like me who get excited when a new version of software comes out you put everything behind yourself rush right away to download it and install regardless of any new bugs it might bring. At first it was great but then the more you use it the more you notice things that aren't quite working right and a few gotchas here and there.

PHP Development Tools

You'll notice that you cannot open code declarations (F3) when any versions of PDT 1.0 - 2.0 Integration Build (as of this witting). However this bug is apparently fixed in the nightly build so go ahead and download that version of PDT to get it working... There is a download link below under My Setup...

Next, if you notice your IDE hang almost forever every time you start typing variables you can fix this by going to Windows -> Preferences -> PHP -> Editor -> Code Assist and un-checking Enable auto activation. This seems to be really laggy and extremely buggy even if you set the Auto activation delay higher. Usually you'll get the error below with this:

The good news is that you still get your code completion when you hit Ctrl + Space and it seems to come up a little faster.

The Right Runtime for the Job

During this hateful quest I decided to try out a few different IDEs. BEAs JRockit (now Oracle's) seem to have given me the best performance on Windows. I've heard good reports about IBMs JRE but since I'm not on a IBM platform they won't let me install it! If you're on linux I've also heard good things about IcedTea Java.

• Oracle JRockit
• IBM Java JDK
• IcedTea Java
• Sun Java

My Setup

• Eclipse 3.4
• PDT: Specially N2008710 but the current nightly version can be better than mine

Conclusion

Aside from what's listed above the only last bug I notice with PDT is the Path Variables settings not workgin (Window -> Preferences -> PHP -> Path Variables). That was useful feature for me in previous versions of PDT but it looks like they've got a few other ways not to define external sources for your project that will work for now.

Of course this is also all development so as time progresses these issues may all be resolved but you like to live on the bleeding edge like me then you might get cut as they say Oddly enough I notice much more better results with the same setup on my Mac Mac owns!