Eclipse announces PHP development tools

OTTAWA, CANADA: The Eclipse Foundation has announced a major upgrade to the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project.

PDT is an open source development tool that provides all the basic code editing capabilities developers need to get started developing PHP applications. The focus of the PDT 2.0 release is to add support for the object-oriented programming features of PHP and to improve the overall user experience of the PDT environment.

To support the object-oriented features of PHP, PDT 2.0 now includes:

* Type Hierarchy view that navigates object-oriented PHP code faster and more easily.

* Type and method navigation that allows for easy searching of PHP code based on type information.

* Override indicators that visually tag PHP methods that have been overridden.

Usability improvements to PDT 2.0 include:

* A new indexing and caching engine, based on the Eclipse Dynamic Language Toolkit (DLTK), which significantly improves the overall performance of common PDT operations.

* A new Mark Occurrences indicator that makes it easier for developers to see where an element is referenced.

* A more sophisticated Code Assist feature that is smarter about providing code completion options based on PHP variable types.

The enhancements provided by release 2.0 make PDT a compelling choice for anyone looking to build simple PHP applications. PDT 2.0 is also ideal for Java programmers who want to write PHP code by providing them with an environment similar to the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) they are already familiar with.

“PDT is one of our most popular downloads at Eclipse,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Since the initial release it has been downloaded over 1 million times. Clearly PDT adoption has been very successful in the Eclipse and PHP communities.”

“Release 2.0 demonstrates our continued commitment to the Eclipse community,” said Andi Gutmans, co-founder and SVP of R&D and Alliances at Zend Technologies, contributor to the PDT project. “PDT is not only the premier open source PHP development tool, but is also the basis for Zend’s commercial, professional-grade IDE for PHP, Zend Studio for Eclipse. Additionally, in order to further align with Eclipse, PDT will become part of the Eclipse Galileo simultaneous release.”