[TYPO3-ect] Eclipse Plugin Development Status

Wed Sep 19 18:42:00 CEST 2007

Johnny Peck wrote: on 15.09.2007 14:51:
> Here is a truncated list of the plugins I currently use
> with Eclipse Europa release 3.3 whilst mucking about with TYPO3.
> 
> PDT - PHP IDE from ZEND - http://zend.com/pdt

Well, I have been using Eclipse for a while now and was using 3.2 with
phpEclipse until I read your post! I wasn't aware of PDT yet, and I
thought "hm cool this sounds more "official" than that phpEclipse stuff,
and from Zend, it cannot be bad", so I kicked the old installation and
installed Eclipse 3.3 with PDT.

It looks cool, and most of it works ok, but I am a bit disappointed of
the default syntax highlighting and editing experience. Maybe it is a
matter of taste (or maybe some setup), but the by default I don't feel
it as nice as it was with phpEclipse. For example copying and pasting
some block of code from one place to another one is now a pain in the
a** because the editor keeps indenting the NEXT line after the pasted
content is added. And another thing that was nice in phpEclipse was the
highlighting of uninitialized variables (yellow underlines), which was
useful to find typos. PDT doesn't seem to do that (yet? configuration?).
Also double and single quotes are highlighted in the same color in PDT,
while in phpEclipse I could recognize some "quoted text" which I don't
like pretty easy (maybe just a matter of configuration)...

At least it formats my document with "array(.." instead of "array (",
which was unconfigurable in phpEclipse (or not?). Another point where
both don't seem capable of being tamed: "test :: test()" doesn't get
reformatted as "test::test()". And phpEclipse even reformats my
"test::test();" as "test :: test();". Pretty ugly!

The whole HTML-validation stuff which is probably new as a "default" in
3.3 is nice, but it takes so much resources that usually Eclipse is busy
doing some background stuff instead of letting me work. And usually
html-templates in extensions are full of errors because they contain
multiple subparts with multiple <body> tags, etc. I even had a case of a
<meta charset="###CHARSET###"> or something and Eclipse was denying to
save the file because of "wrong character set"! Pretty annoying.. :)

Also I saw the "Refactor" methods I knew from Java development and I
gave it a try, but the function doesn't seem to do anything.

Overall I like Eclipse, but I also know Eclipse from the Java
development, and it seems that it is still a "long way to go" to reach
that. I was more satisfied with phpEclipse, but I feel that I cannot
stuck to that as PDT is here to stay. So if you have any tips on
configuration, they are welcome.

I also installed Mylyr and Mantis Connector, which is what we also use
internally, and it promises a very new approach while working. I haven't
entirely managed to grasp what it will do to me except than displaying
tasks and bug tracker reports, but I feel there is more behind that than
just that. :) Needs more time exploring its possibilities...

Cheers,
Ernesto