Well I am not the only one wondering about how open the PHP eclipse proposal by Zend is. Some people seem to be getting desperate for information (the guy actually asked this question several times - oddly enough the eclipse news web interface does not list all posts). Others are reacting with sarcasm. Zend however seems to simply put these questions on their ignore filter.
After publishing my initial post where I question if the proposal process meets my definition of the open source process I had several people on IRC querying me and saying that they very much agree. However when I indicated that Zend needs to know about this too, so that they can better understand the importance to the community people did not seem to follow through. What exactly are people scared about? While I may not agree with Zend on this, they have been receptive when people brought issues to their attention. Although it sometimes took a blog post (scroll down to "I'm Spartacus") with a number of comments to make them realize that they need to fix their priorities (scroll to "A Change in Policy").
So the point is: If you care you have to speak up, otherwise the issue will just not register on the priorities radar at Zend!
I agree with you that things should be made much clearer. I don't understand where they are going. I assume they are very busy and haven't has time to sit down and prepare something.
Lukas, I certainly don't think people are scared. For me is just a question of considering that the PHP IDE that Zend seems to want to offer being too little too late and pretty much irrelevant. But since I never used their Zend Studio, not even their free 30 day trial, I don't think they owe me any explanation. In fact, I have benefited from reading some nice articles in their site without ever paying a penny to Zend.
I have been using PHPEclipse for the past two years. I think that overall the plugin rocks, even though there are still some well known missing features. So I was very curious to see what Zend was going to offer. As it turns out I was disappointed too. I think they created high expectations and failed to deliver. If, as it seems to be the case, debugging is not part of their offering the upside for me switching to the PHP IDE now is a big fat zero. In fact I already uninstalled the Zend plugin.
My understanding is that they intent to open up the protocol once they make their first release. If that means they will also open up the debugger at that time is not really clear to me. Either it seems to me that they are trying to make sure that their debugger should become they primary choice, not because of technical superiority, but simply because they are trying to give themselves a first mover advantage.
Hi Lukas,
Not so much desperate as irritated. I only see the newsgroup through the web interface, and the message I have posted has been deleted twice already.
The thing is I know that the Zend Debugger is not an open source project, but I wanted to see what they say about it. I though the more "submissive" approach would work better as they seem to be ignoring any critical and sarcastic posts. Well, it seems they're pretty much ignoring ALL the posts regarding the debugger.
And I agree with you, I think more people need to question this. The project is looking pretty good so far, and will probably become the de-facto IDE for PHP (considering Zend is behind it), but without a free debugger we might as well just continue using whatever we're already using. Now is the time to steer them though, while they still haven't got a definitive roadmap.
Oh they deleted your posts? Are you sure about this? I thought their software was just buggy. Then again the "http://fools.zend.com" post is still in the archive ..
Even though I think the move to a solid codebase like Eclipse is good, I am unsure what to think of its future. Personally I don't care about the debugger protocol being open or not, and I don't even care if the plugin itself is open source or not. I just want an IDE that works... I like Zend Studio because I am more productive using it, but honestly even that is a matter of perspective. I recently had a look at the new free Visual Studio editor from M$, and was literally blown away - I know I love PHP, but why did that make me feel like I am working with child's toys?
Starting a PHP IDE from scratch may yield better results in the long end, but somehow considering the price of the Zend Studio I feel a bit betrayed because the wait for the new IDE is going to be quite long... and M$ are giving away their pretty awesome editor for free.
Maybe by the time the new PHP IDE is ready, M$'s plans to integrate PHP into the list of supported .NET languages will have become a reality and I will be able to use their editor to code. And that about sums it up: Zend is currently fighting on so many fronts that everything looks like chaos. The new Eclipse plugin only adds to the general confusion.
The PHP IDE is an open source project. It is an extensible framework for a PHP integrated development environment.
The PHP IDE project will also include a framework for debugging PHP applications. The debugging framework will be based on Zend's debugger and will include a debugger protocol and a full implementation of the client side.
The server side debugger will not be part of the of the PHP IDE project. But Zend will give the server side debugger for the PHP IDE for free!
Sounds like land grab to me. So the conclusion is that infact this is not an open source development process and simply a way to get people to visit zend.com.
