Zend Technologies has announced the general availability of Zend Studio 9.0 in what is heralded as a "significant update" to its IDE for web application developers using the dynamic PHP language. Zend lauds the newly charged IDE's support for Git and GitHub and its debugging controls in what it has positioned as a leaner Zend Studio that can easily be configured to suit individual developer needs.
By incorporating Git and GitHub, Zend is bringing version control to bear on web application development projects in today's distributed developer environments. Git is an open-source distributed version control system recognized for its ability to handle small to medium to very large software development projects with speed and efficiency. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects that use Git.
According to Zend, "Armed with Git/GitHub support, Zend Studio 9.0 users can bring in code from a repository to clone, share, and branch it, working and collaborating more efficiently than was possible before. New smart product configuration enables developers to customize their IDE, easily adding and removing plug-ins such as Mylyn task-focused programming as well as color themes and more, to suit individual work preferences and project requirements. As a result, Zend Studio 9.0 can provide on average a 67% faster default startup, with a 40% smaller default disk footprint and a lower memory footprint."
Zend Studio 9.0 also features JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 editor improvements that help developers write and edit client-side code more productively. Because Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, web application developers using Zend Studio should also find that they can benefit from many of the enhancements delivered by the Eclipse community in Eclipse 3.7.
Developers in the phpcloud.com<.a> community will find that Zend Studio 9.0 can use the Zend Developer Cloud as a development runtime. Zend Studio 9.0 also supports application deployment to Zend Application Fabric, an elastic cloud platform powered by Zend Server for deploying to a variety of clouds.
Along with these version 9.0 product enhancements, Zend Studio offers developers a PHP coding experience with features including Code Assist, code generation, refactoring, Unit testing, profiling, and debugging. Zend Studio also provides integration with Zend Framework for creating projects and working with MVC-architecture code. In addition, integration with Zend Server enables support for building deployment packages, viewing code traces, and more. Other Zend Studio features include remote server and VMware Workstation support for the development runtime, and integrated JavaScript editing and seamless joint debugging of server-side PHP and client-side JavaScript.
