bitwise: Can you explain what exactly the PDT is? Is it a ready-to-use PHP IDE for Eclipse? Is it a set of tools that can be used by developers who want to create a PHP IDE - or is it both...?
Ian: EclipsePDT is a ready-to-use PHP IDE for Eclipse. It includes editors and inspectors that PHP developers can use to create PHP applications. PDT is also an extensible framework for others to build other PHP IDEs or other PHP tools.
bitwise: Why is the PDT necessary? There are, after all, numerous PHP development tools, editors and IDEs available. Why this one?
Ian: In our experience, developers tend to often switch between different tools and languages. Eclipse provides a platform for integrating all their tools into one place. Utilizing PDT allows developers to have a PHP IDE that is integrated into the Eclipse platform.
bitwise: I understand that there is no debugger include with the PDT. That’s a huge limitation, isn’t it? Even though you can add in a 3rd party debugger, won’t that inevitably make debugging slow and inefficient?
Yossi: There is no debugger included in the PDT package, but the user can download an executable Zend Debugger or XDebug for debugging PHP scripts.
The most common debugging is for Web page and for that you need to have a debugger on the web server, which often is not located where the IDE is located. So, the user needs to download a debugger for the web server computer.
bitwise: Does the launch of the PDT Project suggest that Java is no longer the core language used by Eclipse developers? Indeed, when it comes to developing Web applications (for which Java was once touted as the perfect language), isn’t PHP now the dominant player?
Ian: The PDT project is definitely a response to the millions of PHP developers looking for good quality tools. There are still a lot of developers using Eclipse for Java development, just like there are a lot of C/C++ developers using Eclipse CDT for C/C++ development. This is really about growing the entire Eclipse community to include the PHP development community.
bitwise: What sort of licence is PDT release under? If I were to develop an application would I a) be obliged to share my source code and b) could I release a commercial product or does it have to be open source?
Ian: It has been released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The EPL does allow for organizations to build commercial products on top of Eclipse technology.
bitwise: How many people are currently working on it? When is the next major release planned and what will be the significant additions?
Yossi: About eight people are developing the project but hundreds more are active in testing the project and providing feedback. The next version will be a bug fix release in a few weeks, while the next major release will be in Q1 2008, which will include additional editor enhancements and integration.
bitwise: What is the biggest challenge the development teams has faced in developing the PDT? And what are the big challenges to be overcome in future?
Yossi: The biggest challenge was to adjust to the plug-in mechanism and to be dependent on other projects, which are not actually part of the team responsibility (Eclipse Platform and WTP). In the future we want to take part in these project more actively and even be part of the development resources of these projects.
bitwise: To what extent is Eclipse now in competition with NetBeans? Both are open source, cross-platform, multi language platforms. If I were to standardize on one which should I choose and why?
Ian: It is interesting; we find that Visual Studio is the main competitor for Eclipse. If you look at the overall software development community there are really two main development platforms and ecosystems: Eclipse and MS Visual Studio. What we find is that if people are doing .Net development then Visual Studio is the obvious choice. If they are doing anything else, Eclipse is very popular.
Key features in PDT 1.0 include:
Context sensitive editors that provide capabilities such as syntax highlighting, code assist and code folding.
Integration with the Eclipse project model that allows for inspection using the File and Project Outline Views and a new PHP Explorer View.
Support for incremental debugging of PHP code
Extensive frameworks and API’s that allow developers and ISVs to easily extend PDT to create new and interesting PHP oriented developer tools.
PDT 1.0 is available for download at http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/downloads/. More information about the PDT project can be found at http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/.
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