David Krings wrote:
I did hear back from Mr. Lucka at Luckasoft and he explained what their
motivation and plans are. The difference supposedly is between the free
and commercial version of dbg and Luckasoft doesn't sell enough licenses
to warrant the investment into the commercial version. Mr. Lucka wrote
that after three years of selling EnginSite PHP they recovered about 1/3
of their development expenses. I didn't want to go down the path and
discuss with him why that most likely happened that way. Luckasoft makes
money selling software for product packaging, a PHP IDE is a side
product that they apparently work on in slow times. Mr. Lucka was so
nice to point out PHPEdit from WaterProof (www.waterproof.fr). It is
reasonably priced (80$) and seems to not require the annoying start/stop
of the debugger at script start. I put it through a quick test and I
really like it. This is for sure one candidate that offers the features
I want at a price I am willing to pay. I will compare it against
NuSphere PHPEd Pro which strikes me a bit overpriced for what it can do.
I'll report back.
OK, here is my report back. Generally, NuSphere, WaterProof, and
Luckasoft have about the same feature set. The big difference is the
debugger implementation. Luckasoft uses the free dbg, WaterProof uses
XDebug, and NuSphere the commerical dbg.
XDebug doesn't require stopping at the start of every script, but blows
up after hitting a rather harmless header("location:.... redirect. I use
those all over the place to send the client to different places after
the user made a decision as to what he/she wants to do.
The only one debugger that doesn't have to run in hiccup mode and
doesn't get confused by a redirect is the commercial dbg....exclusively
for NuSphere. :( That may explain the price tag.
WaterProof's PHPEd also comes with a personal license. One can write to
WaterProof and explain why one needs a PHP IDE for free and depending on
their good will one gets a personal license for free. Nice move!
So, the conclusion so far is, unless I can come up with the 300$ for
NuSphere there isn't any reason to change IDEs...at least not on
Windows. Really disappointing and not because I want a pro IDE for free
or on the cheap. If I'd have the bucks I'd buy NuSphere in a heartbeat,
but you know, they don't pay much for a tech writer.Next try is to bug
the dbg people.
Gee, this rapidly inhales!
David
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