March 15, 2004 b ISSUE 11 GET TECHNOLOGY RIGHT Open Source Scripting Made Easy Zend Studio and PHPEd lend a commercial polish to open source Web development. the entrenchment of commercial Web ColdFusion has Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, The embedded Web browser overlays the edi- application languages — most notably and JSP has a variety of tools from commer- tor window by default, but its layout is fully Microsoft’s ASP (now ASP .Net), Sun’s JSP, cial sources such as Borland and open source customizable. and Macromedia’s ColdFusion — seems to projects such as Eclipse and NetBeans. PHP’s For online help, NuSphere encoded PHP, leave little room for open source alternatives. enormous success, however, is not tied to spe- HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), MySQL, Yet one open source Web scripting language cific tools. Rather, the combination of a code and several other manuals into Windows has truly hit the big time: PHP, a fashionably editor and a browser is likely the most com- HTML help system files. Hard-core open recursive acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor. mon PHP development environment. source developers are bred to live without such Of the roughly 10 million sites running on But commercial alternatives do exist. The platform-bound advantages, but the difference the Apache Web server, nearly half are running gold standard is Dreamweaver, which counts between the PHPEd native Windows PHP, according to SecuritySpace.com, a con- PHP among its many supported Web applica- approach and Zend Studio’s platform-agnos- sulting group that gathers statistics on Inter- tion languages. Commercial tools dedicated tic Java manifests itself in productivity. net online services. More surprising, U.K.- solely to PHP development are rare. Two of the Unlike Zend Studio, PHPEd neither checks based Internet research and analysis company most often used tools are NuSphere’s PHPEd as you type nor flags coding errors while edit- Netcraft reported last August that the use of 3.3 and Zend Technologies’ Zend Studio 3.0.2. ing. But those are relatively trivial shortcom- PHP on Windows Web servers is skyrocketing I used two platforms for testing these two ings compared to the editing features unique and is on course to overtake Macromedia’s products: an Apple 17-inch PowerBook run- to PHPEd. The help system plays a role in the ColdFusion. ning OS X 10.3 (Panther) with a Power Mac editor by displaying documentation relevant to Commercial scripting languages have G5 running OS X 10.3 Server; and a Fujitsu the context of the programmer’s work. The edi- drawn success from powerful and widely used Athlon-M Lifebook running Windows Server tor supplies the expected code completion fea- development tools: ASP has Visual Studio, 2003 and hosting Linux under Microsoft’s tures — as does Zend Studio, but PHPEd takes Virtual PC. editing a few steps further. PHPEd’s templates insert well-formed boil- NuSphere PHPEd 3.3 Zend Studio 3.0.2 PHPEd Puts It All in One Box erplates for common PHP and HTML ele- NuSphere PHPEd and Zend Studio NuSphere nusphere.com Zend Technologies zend.com ments. Similarly, PHPEd can close HTML and match up closely in terms of core XML tags for you, and it can show you which VERY GOOD 7.9 GOOD 5.5 functionality. PHPEd is limited to tags and attributes are appropriate given your Features (30%) 8 8 Features (30%) 6 6 Windows and Linux, which restricts location within the document. Documentation (20%) 8 8 Documentation (20%) 4 4 its audience but will likely satisfy the PHPEd’s built-in database handling resolves Ease of use (20%) 8 8 Ease of use (20%) 7 7 majority of PHP developers. The one of open source’s greatest challenges: the Setup (20%) 8 8 Setup (20%) 5 5 Windows version of PHPEd use of an external database in an application. Value (10%) 7 Value (10%) 5 5 includes remote debugger executa- PHP makes this easier with its standard set of COST: Starts at $299 COST: Starts at $195 bles for platforms that PHPEd does database functions, but developers often need PLATFORMS: Windows 98 or later PLATFORMS: Windows NT 4 or not support, including OS X. I test- a place to start. and Red Hat Linux 7 or later later, most versions of Linux, and ed the product using Windows XP. The embedded database client allows you to Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3 Although the idea of platform- locate all of the running databases on a given BOTTOM LINE: NuSphere BOTTOM LINE: The Zend Studio limited tools for a cross-platform server. With this embedded client in place, you PHPEd 3.3 is almost the perfect IDE leverages Zend’s active language rankles me a bit, I have few can drill down from the top level, where tables development environment for PHP. participation in the PHP project. other reservations about PHPEd. and user permissions are defined, to the bot- Its integrated Web browser, first- Despite its high-quality debugger Three features in particular stand tom level, where field content is shown. class documentation (including and helpful code analysis tool, out: strong database support, an PHPEd’s database form wizard generates context-sensitive help), and wizard- in the end, technical shortcomings embedded browser, and online doc- PHP/HTML code that will update, add, or based connectivity to databases and poor documentation hamper umentation. NuSphere’s IDE (inte- and Web services make it the only the product’s performance. It fails view rows in a given table. The wizard not only IDE worth considering if PHP in most ways to measure up in grated development environment) creates the server-side code, but it generates development is your primary job. the commercial tools space. has a built-in database client with client-side JavaScript for field validation and viewing, editing, and query capabil- applies presentation styles through easily ities for MySQL and PostgreSQL. editable configuration files. Copyright © 2004 by InfoWorld Media Group Inc., a subsidiary of IDG Communications Inc. Posted from InfoWorld, 501 Second Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. #1-3932711 Managed by Reprint Management Services, 717.399.1900. To request a quote online, visit www.reprintbuyer.com. The last laudable feature is PHPEd’s time of Version 1.4.1 or later, NuSOAP wizard. which is a standard part of Although SOAP is not exactly rocket science Apple’s OS X 10.3; you can also — especially in PHP — the NuSOAP wizard download it from infoworld.com/ gives developers a good place to start. The wiz- 992. A license for the Zend Studio ard uses WSDL to query the list of SOAP ser- client includes a license for Zend vices at a given URL. When you select a ser- Studio Server, which incorporates vice, PHPEd inserts the necessary PHP code the Zend Optimizer code acceler- into your file. ator, a remote debugger module, Some readers may think it unfair to compare and the Zend Server Center — a a cross-OS Java IDE to one written specifical- basic, moderately helpful Web- ly for a pair of operating systems. Given the based configuration system for enormous productivity advantages that PHP. PHPEd provides, developers should simply The server requires too much accept that they’ll have to use Windows or skill to install on OS X. You’ll be Linux for their PHP projects. This small con- asked for the location of all of the cession is worth it, because PHPEd is a proper, Apache and PHP configuration world-class IDE for PHP code. directories. There are recom- Does PHPEd top Dreamweaver? Not even mended defaults for these direc- The PHPEd 3.3 environment incorporates a context-sensitive HTML help close, but then matching Dreamweaver does- tories, but in many cases, Apple system. The built-in Web engine also obviates the need for an external n’t appear to be the objective. By dedicating does not honor them. Zend Stu- browser while debugging. itself to a single programming language, dio Server’s installer offers to plug NuSphere has managed to create a powerful in its own PHP — don’t. It has fewer compiled- but it wastes a lot of time. Zend’s GUI debug- IDE in PHPEd that is as easy to learn and use in capabilities, and in my case, it botched my ger gives users of other IDEs the breakpoints, as the PHP language itself. Power Mac G5’s PHP configuration so badly variable inspectors, debug message console, that it wouldn’t run. Instead, replace Apple’s and stack trace they expect. Zend Studio dis- Zend’s Inside Angle PHP per the instructions at entropy.ch before plays the incremental HTML output of a Zend Technologies is closely allied with the you install Zend Studio or Zend Studio Server. debugging session as text, and the IDE will PHP project, from whose principals the Zend Some of Zend Studio’s interface behavior is open a browser for you so you can see what the Engine — an impressive open source perfor- quirky to the point of annoying. Property panes rendered page will look like. mance accelerator for PHP — was created. in the IDE’s configuration interface sometimes Zend Studio’s editor is rather good. It knows Zend sells products for PHP code encryption, popped up blank, and their contents filled in PHP’s syntax and standard libraries well. If caching and compression, and scalability. Sim- only after I switched to another pane and then you violate syntax in an obvious way — say, by ilar to many open source projects with com- switched back. Some dialog boxes didn’t close inserting an extra bracket or parenthesis — the mercial partners, Zend’s for-sale wares can be when I clicked the OK or Cancel button, so I had editor will immediately display Microsoft difficult to discern from features built into to click the OS X window manager’s Close but- Word-style red squiggly underlines; however, PHP.