It seems I’m not the only one who thinks the new PHP support in NetBeans is pretty cool.

Roumen’s blog points to a post on the zend forums:

My company bought 3 3-year licenses for Zend Studio earlier this and up until a few weeks ago, there was nothing else on the market that even came close to meeting our requirements. Then Netbeans released 6.5 with PHP support. Right out of the gate, their PHP and JavaScript support is on the whole, so much better and faster than Zend’s product, with so many fewer bugs, that despite the fact that we spent $1000 this year investing in Zend’s product, and I personally have spent time with Zend’s tech support and developers (good guys, very helpful), I am assisting my team in migrating over to use Netbeans for most of our development.

and a comment from Demian there really hits the nail on the head:

As a Zend license payer for many years I believe I’m entitled to share my opinion on the emergence of netbeans as an Eclipse and Zend Studio killer, at least as far as PHP support is concerned.

This is not a superficial “ide war” as suggested above, but probably more a reflection of the fact that PHP developers have had to endure low quality IDEs for years, so the relief felt now that a decent product, netbeans 6.5, has appeared on the market, is tremendous. Netbeans is far more than just decent though, it is clearly head and shoulders above Zend Studio for Eclipse, you only need to watch the videos or use it for 5 minutes to realize.

The Zend Studio product on the other hand maintained the same bugs in its product for literally years, releasing updates less than once a year, and showing an apparent total lack of interest in responding to the requests of its customers.

Then with the move to Eclipse customers were burdened with an even slower, more bloated and memory hungry app with possibly thousands of unnecessary configuration options and with an odyssey of undertaking required to get debugging working. I’m not surprised, given the context, that there is a lot of emotion being expressed now that a decent product is finally available.

For years we had to put up with Zend Studio’s bugs simply because there wasn’t anything better. Now there is.