Although I've been using PDT, PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform, I've realized for long time that I've not taken any advantage of using it for writing PHP code - I haven't run the code standalone on Eclipse. And besides, PDT doesn't give some basic features that other plugins on Eclipse provide such as following: refactoring feature that allows me to modify all the occurrence of the same variable/function names, searching where a particular variable/function is used in the workspace. Since these things are the least I expect from IDE, I now suspect that either I'm not using this plugin properly, or I'm using a wrong one.
Current (before installing anything new) environment: Eclipse Indigo Service Release 2, PDT 3.1.0
So, 1st I tried upgrading PDT to 3.1.1. Upgrade from "Help" --> "Install New Software" then,
Then choose what's shown in the next dialog.
Then, however, after being restarted Eclipse starts to complaing while trying to open .php files like this:
 |
| "Unsupported content type type in editor" |
I haven't found a solution to this, but I found PDT 3.1 might be only compatible with Eclipse 4.x, as http://wiki.eclipse.org/PDT/Installation implies. Ok, it might be good time for installing Eclipse 4 (Juno) now.
In the meantime while installing Eclipse Juno, also giving a shot to PHPEclipse (http://www.phpeclipse.com/). Looks the development is not very active, but not necessarily because of that, I stopped using this also, since it doesn't show full list of functions on "Outline" (showed instead only part of variables for some reason).
With
Eclipse Juno, PDT 3.1.1 works normal.
One thing good about Juno is it provides fairly good amount of list of installable software by default. The latest version of PDT is also available (
Update: this list is even available at least on Eclipse 3.7 Indigo) :
Actually, I almost quit using Juno because I wasn't able to find one of my most frequently-used features that are available in 3.x, which is to open "new editor" that's done at pop-up when right-clicking on the tab of each file. See the image below.
 |
| On Eclipse Juno, "New Editor" option is not available |
Looks like this "trivial but important" feature is still available in "Window" menu.
So far Juno provides sufficient feature to me, although there's a lot of internal change in the look & feel, some of which seem slow and dumb, I'll stick to this.
Update) People are reporting the slow performance of Juno's GUI. Despite the root cause is yet to be detected, nice workaround is to c
hange the Appearance into "Classic (Preferences->General->Appearance), as suggested here.
Btw,
"Call Hierarchy" feature might not have been implemented, even on the latest version of PDT (v3.1). So what I do right now in order to find where a particular function is in use is to use "Search" feature (highlight the function or variable you want, and right-click will show you the option), which takes awhile everytime for full-text search over the workspace you designate. I think I'm using PDT not because of its features but only because it is Eclipse.
Comments