On 02/12/2010 20:24, Ron Dyck wrote:
*I prefer Windows XP for development. ZS seems slow and clunky on it.
phpDesigner works faster than ZS, NetNeans et al on XP in my experience.
Caveat: last time I compared was about a year ago. Also, I work in my own
studio, responsible for my own costs. ZS seems unnecessarily pricey without
having enough superior facilities to warrant the price (circa $99 would grab
me and lots of other developers I know).
I can relate to the costs of being independent. Although some of the
features of ZS are great time savers watching Jon Lebensold on NetBeans has
me wondering if that isn't a good cost saving alternative on a Mac.
BTW, the latest version of ZS does utilize the latest version of Eclipse
which is much faster. But then a good IDE is somewhat of a tradeoff, between
speed and features.
I have NetBeans but disregard it as slow/clunky, especially when other
applications are running.
Being both selfish and business minded as regards IDE, I wonder at the
marketing intention of the ZS price tag,[1] especially in relation to
increasing the ZF developer base. Logically,* wider usage at <$100 beats
limited usage at $299. Many devoted developers move on to organisations
too, thus expanding the Zend product user base. With ZF 2.0 soon to
arrive and with vastly more development control than the likes of Drupal
it seems like a good way to meet marketing principles of attraction to
and retention within the ZF development world. Meantime, the only real
feature difference between phpDesigner and ZS seems to be the automatic
object lookup - the former IDE does it but with two extra mouse clicks.
Could be that I'm behind on latest ZS specs of course! I shall take
another look at ZS during the festive break.
*My wife has a marketing masters and I have taught marketing at postgrad
level for several years: hence the marketing "logic".
