Eclipse PDT 2.0 incoming
It looks like the next major release of one of the best PHP development tools around, PDT for the Eclipse platform, is due out soon. Version 2.0 had initially been expected on September 15th earlier this year, but due to a shift in the specification and roadmap for the project they ended up delaying the proposed release date to December 29th.
This date seems to be realistic, as the first of 3 proposed release candidates was released on December 9th on the PDT site. This is good news, as it is intended to provide a bunch of new features for us PHP developers out there, along with better integration with existing Eclipse frameworks and foundations such as the WTP and DLTK modules.
Among the proposed features are such things as support for PHP 5.3 (namespaces and so on) and Eclipse 3.4. This shift to the latest Eclipse base will please many people as it will allow them to utilise the latest versions of productivity tools and other development IDEs which only work in v3.4 (PDT 1.03 only works on Eclipse 3.3 from my experience, I haven’t tested PDT 1.05 which was released recently and says it works with Eclipse 3.4 – maybe this is a stop-gap solution).
The full plan is available here for those of you who are interested, but the main points of improvement are:
- Mark occurances – a handy editor feature for refactoring and debugging
- Improvements to the modelling of your PHP projects in the system (PHP Model Infrastructure, whatever that is, Type Hierarchy View and an improved PHP Explorer)
- Code templates
- Code assistance with dynamic variables and types along with overridden methods
As you can see, none of the features are going to change your life overnight, but they may well make an already great tool even better, tighter and more in-depth than before – which can’t be bad.
If you want to check out the release candidates (RC1 is out at the time of writing) then go over to the PDT download page and grab it there. You will need Eclipse 3.4 with a few other modules first though!
Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development
