Zend Studio Updates

What's New in Zend Studio 13.5

Improved Performance

PHP indexer now 3 times faster

Zend Studio 13.5 introduces a new PHP indexer, based on Apache Lucene, that replaces the prior PHP indexer based on the H2 database. The new indexer allows faster execution of basic tasks like displaying code assist, validating code, navigating through source code, searching for PHP types and methods, and building the type hierarchy. All these tasks execute up to 3 times faster. The indexing process itself runs up to 3 times faster too and consumes up to 3 times less space on the file system.

Query the index database while it’s still being built

A noteworthy feature of the new PHP indexer is that it allows querying the index database while it’s still being built. This means no more freezing of the IDE if the code assist is triggered while the projects are still being indexed. You can start being productive the very first second after launching Zend Studio.

Execute your code when you want

Any long-running background jobs that lock the IDE workspace no longer block the executing run/debug launchers. You can execute your code as soon as you want, while the IDE is still executing the code validation, indexing, and other background jobs.

PHP 7 Support

PHP 7 is the default

PHP 7 is the default interpreter. New PHP projects are configured for PHP 7.

PHP 7 built-in executables with Zend Debugger

Zend Studio bundles PHP 7 built-in executables with Zend Debugger that can be used for running and debugging PHP CLI scripts. These built-in executables are also used for running Composer, PHPUnit, and the Apigility editors.

Anonymous classes and functions support

The support for anonymous classes and functions is improved both in the PHP editor and in the outline view.

Return types in the outline view

The return types of functions and methods are displayed in the outline view. The outline view displays both PHP 7 return type declarations and PHPDoc @return declarations.

Correct syntax highlighting for reserved words

PHP 7 allows the use of reserved words as properties, constants, and method names, defined on classes, functions, and traits. Zend Studio 13.5 now determines the context where the reserved words are used and highlights them correctly.

PHP Editor Improvements

Adjust and save code assist window sizes

If the window size of the code assist is too small, you can easily resize using the mouse by hovering on the window edges. With Zend Studio 13.5 this change in the window size is remembered, so you don't need to do it again next time you use the code assist.

Hovering over problem markers shows the available quick fixes

Zend Studio provides quick fixes for many validation issues. It’s now easier to use the quick fixes by simply hovering the mouse over the underlined problem marker – a hover window pops up showing the available quick fixes. Clicking on any of the quick fixes immediately applies it to the source code.

Improved support for PHPDoc tags

Code assist now works better inside PHPDoc blocks. In particular, code assist suggests available PHP classes for the @param, @return, and @throws tags.

Inline @var comments considered by semantic analysis

In previous releases, semantic analysis marked variables as "undefined" even though they were explicitly annotated with an inline @var comment. These comments are now scanned by semantic analysis and taken into account when identifying undefined variables.

PHP Debugger

PHP exception breakpoints (Xdebug only)

PHP exception breakpoints can be added using the "Add PHP Exception Breakpoint" tool button in the breakpoints view. The debugger breaks the execution when the specified PHP exception is thrown. The exception breakpoints work only if Xdebug is used - Zend Debugger does not support these kinds of breakpoints.

Terminal View

Terminal view now available in the main package

The terminal view is now part of the main installation package. It can be opened in several ways:

• Using the Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut to open a local terminal
• Using Shift+Ctrl+Alt+T to open a Launch Terminal dialog allows the selection of a different terminal type, for example an SSH Terminal
• Using the Show In > Terminal context menu in the PHP Explorer view
• Using the Window > Show View > Other menu

Composer output integration

The output of the composer tool is now displayed in the terminal view instead of the plain console view. This way the composer output supports ANSI coloring and enables interactive user input.

Other Enhancements

• Integration with EGit plugin versions 4.2 and 4.3 introduces improvements in GitFlow, Gerrit, and GitHub support, in the staging view and in the support for submodules and nested repositories.
• Quick fixes now available in the problems view, indicated by a lightbulb and invoked using the context menu or the Ctrl+1 shortcut.
• Detection of local Zend Server is now optional.
• CSS3 profile is available in the CSS editor and code assist suggests CSS3-related declarations.
• Installed Eclipse Marketplace Client plugin makes it easier to find and install Eclipse community plugins.
• Redesigned trial screen uses RCP widgets instead of embedding a web page, reducing issues on some distributions of Linux.

Bug Fixes

Performance

• Fixed performance problem when code assist is invoked inside a large array structure
• Fixed performance problem with files containing lots of assignment operators to the same variable

PHP 7

• Fixed issue with marking String, Int, Float, and Bool as unknown types in function parameters
• Fixed issue with missing @return tag in generated PHPDoc
• Fixed issue with semantic analysis skipping checks for return types

PHP Editor

• Fixed issue with code folding during typing
• Fixed issue with format on saving the editor
• Fixed issue with generated use statements adding an empty line

PHP Debugger

• Fixed issue with not stopping on breakpoints when Xdebug is used
• Fixed issue with failing to start PHPUnit tests when using PHP executables without a debugger
• Fixed issue with breakpoints not working for linked resources

See Release Notes

What's New in Zend Studio 13

The Fastest Path to PHP 7, Docker Management and Optimized User Experience

The latest release includes support for PHP 7 with PHP 7 Express migration assistant, support for Docker and Git Flow, upgraded editor and debugging experience, and other performance and quality improvements.

PHP 7 Support 

Zend Studio 13 ships with the most complete PHP 7 support to date. It provides support for the newest scripting concepts in PHP 7, such as Return Type Declarations, Anonymous Classes, the Spaceship Operator, Group Use Declarations, Scalar Type Hints, and more.

PHP 7 Express

The new built-in migration tool assistant makes the transition to PHP 7 easier and faster. This new tool scans existing projects for compatibility issues such as - removed and deprecated usages, or new reserved words in PHP 7.  It points developers to the exact line of code where the issue is located and suggests quick fixes.

Docker Support

Zend Studio 13 includes new Docker tooling that supports the management of Docker Images and Containers. It integrates with existing PHP tooling which allows running, testing and debugging PHP applications on Docker Containers with a PHP stack.

Git Flow Support

Zend Studio 13 comes with the latest and greatest EGit 4.0 tooling. One of the highlights in this new version is the support for the Git Flow branching model which is pretty commonly used among PHP developers.

Installation as an Eclipse Plugin

This new version of Zend Studio is based on the latest version of Eclipse - Mars 4.5.1 . Developers already using Eclipse as a development platform will welcome the addition of a dedicated Zend Studio 13 plugin that can be installed directly from within their development environment.

Enhanced Debugging Experience

A new debugging workflow design makes debugging easier. Zend Studio automatically detects the installed debugger for local and remote Servers and helps configure the client IPs for debugging.

Redundant client IPs are detected and removed while invalid or inaccessible IPs are reported. And when adding a new PHP server, Zend Studio will automatically provide the “best match” client IP.

Also, Zend Debugger tunneling configuration can now be set up in debugger client settings for PHP server.

Other Enhancements

Improved PHP Editor

• Syntax coloring for visibility keywords (private, protected, public)
• Improved performance for smart indentation and pasting code
• New "Deprecated API" validator
• New "Reserved types" validator (PHP7)
• New "Multiple default cases in a switch" validator (PHP7)
• Quick assist for variable comment generation
• New command and quick fixes for organizing use statements
• New option for editors - “Close Tabs to the Left/Right”

Improved Zend Server Integration

• Corrected exporting of Apigility production ZPK packages
• Improved automatic uploading of PHP project resources
• Improved deployment of PHP applications to a server
• Improved enabling/disabling of PHP project autoupload
• Simplified detection and activation of Web API communication channel for Zend Server configurations
• Zend Server "Show in IDE" action is now using path mapping to find and open corresponding local PHP files in Studio
• "Edit Server" dialog restores its previous size and location with every run
• PHP servers table available in "Servers" preference page can be sorted both by name and URL
• Path mapping table available in server editor can be sorted now both by server and local path
• Path mapping table gained new column which indicates whether path mapping has been added automatically by environment or by a user

See Release Notes

What's New in Zend Studio 12.5

We've just turbo-charged Zend Studio with cool new features that will boost your productivity. The latest release includes upgraded debugging and testing experience, enhanced support for popular frameworks, and many other installation, performance and quality improvements.  

Upgraded Debugger 

The new version includes a whole new way to setup remote debugging - if you have multiple servers configured, locally, in the cloud or remotely on an intranet, you can configure the debugger separately for each particular server and define the connection settings via the server creation and edit wizard.

Improved Testing

Support for PHPUnit 4 for effective integration testing and simplified unit tests to make sure your code is stable and functioning correctly.

Enhanced APIs Support

Support for the latest version of Apigility so you can build, test, and debug your APIs more efficiently.

Integration of Popular Plugins

Content assist for Magento and Doctrine,  Angular JS Explorer View, Markdown Editor and GitHubMylyn Integration that allows you to use a GitHub repository to store and retrieve Mylyn tasks.

Additional improvements include upgraded installation packages with built-in JRE, so you don’t have to pre-install it like before, the font size plugin, many performance and quality improvements, and more.

Angular JS

Develop client side apps with AngularJS, open-source web application framework from Google. Zend Studio takes full advantage of the framework client-side model–view–controller (MVC) architecture.

Ionic

Create hybrid mobile apps with the integrated Ionic framework. Ionic offers a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components, gestures, and tools for building highly interactive apps.

Cordova

Code mobile apps all in HTML/CSS/JS from within Studio with Cordova. Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device functions from JavaScript. 

Split Editor

Get the ultimate in user experience and productivity functionality with the new split editor. Split it vertically, or horizontally to see more code at once.  

Multi-Cursor

Code faster by editing several lines of code at once with the new multi-cursor feature.  

Dark theme

Code in style. You asked for it, you got it. Now you can see your code on a black background by working with the all new dark theme.

PHP 5.6 Language Support

Get full support for PHP 5.6. Zend Studio takes full advantage of the new PHP features like constant scalar expressions, variadic functions, phpdbg, large file uploads, gost-crypto hash algorithm, and more.

Z-Ray / Z-Ray Live!

Using the certified PHP stack Zend Server? Discover hidden bugs and performance issues right from your browser and then open a debugging or profiling session directly from Z-Ray to fix the uncovered issues using Zend Studio. Leverage Z-Ray Live! to get information on your application performance right from mobile devices and address them with Studio.

With Z-Ray Live, you can debug mobile and Web Services API calls with Z-Ray Live!  All the advantages of Z-Ray for debugging requests originating from native mobile clients and other non-browser sources.

Fully Working Mobile App W/ Source Code

Get a fully working mobile app with its source code.  You can use the code to learn how to create mobile apps or leverage it for your own applications.  Study it, copy it, edit it. It’s all yours to work with.

This application uses HTML5/CSS/JS on the client side and Zend Framework + Apigility with Zend Server on the back-end. The application itself monitors your application and gives you live statistics on your server performance. 

This mobile app is intended for demo purposes. The application and source code are available with Zend Studio and on GitHub. 

The source code is available on Github. 

Bower

Manage easily all your frameworks, libraries, assets, and utilities with the integrated Bower framework. Bower works by fetching and installing packages from all over, taking care of hunting, finding, downloading, and saving the items you’re looking for. It provides hooks to facilitate using packages in your tools and workflows. Bower is optimized for the front-end. It uses a flat dependency tree, requiring only one version for each package, reducing page load to a minimum.

Cloud Deployment

Zend Studio lets you deploy your PHP application on any server.  

In addition, you can take full advantage of the Cloud with the Amazon AWS Zend certified PHP stack offering, an instantly available, consistent PHP environment that provides a cloud-based Zend Server.

Zend Studio also works with other leading Cloud platforms, such as IBM Bluemix and SoftLayer, Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure.

You can easily deploy your PHP applications on these public or private platforms, by using the built-in cloud deployment integration functionality.

IBM i xml Toolkit Libraries

Extend PHP code to access IBM i resources. The newly integrated Toolkit is designed to work either statelessly or statefully. Its stateful abilities enable developers to call RPG/COBOL/CL programs and APIs while retaining cursors, library lists, the QTEMP library, and more, to enable reuse of existing programs for web applications.

Eclipse 4 Luna Platform

Zend Studio 12 is built on top of the Eclipse 4 – Luna platform and benefits from many new enhancements included in the new platform.

See Release Notes

What's New in Zend Studio 11

Apigility Integration

Zend Studio can create a new Apigility-enabled project, install all required Composer dependencies and launch the Apigility Admin with just a few clicks. As you start defining new APIs, all changes made by Apigility will be visible in the PHP Explorer view and links in the Apigility Admin UI will open your PHP file in the source code editor. Once the service is defined, you are just one click away from seeing it in action - the ‘Test Service’ button will enable you to send requests and check responses.

And, if you're working on a Cloud-Connected Mobile project, the client-side of your mobile application can easily be connected with the API created via Apigility.

Production-Ready Applications

The "Export Deployment Package" wizard now includes a new “production-ready” option. This option uses the ZF Deploy tool to prepare your application for production usage by excluding any development modules, and replacing the configuration files for testing with configurations optimized for a production environment.

Tighter Integration with Application Servers

This new version of Zend Studio introduces a unified and centralized PHP servers configuration and access management. The new ‘PHP Servers’ view in combination with streamlined configuration wizards, provide a convenient way of managing different types of server configurations, whether local, remote, on premise, or in the cloud. Zend Studio will guide you through all the settings, including: Path Mapping, Tunneling, Automatic Upload and Debugger preferences.

Enhanced Composer Integration

With the latest Zend Studio, managing Composer dependencies is easier than ever. With the revamped and much faster dependency browser, you can take advantage of improved validation to avoid runtime problems, add Composer support during project creation, and easily work with password-protected repositories.

Reduced Size, Better Performance, Improved Quality

Zend Studio 11 comes with smaller disk footprint, faster startup time, numerous performance improvements (especially around Remote Systems and servers integration) and bug fixes.

See Release Notes

What's New in Zend Studio 10.6

PHP Language Support

PHP 5.5 is now fully supported by Zend Studio - take advantage of features like generators, the finally keyword, new password hashing API, array and string literal dereferencing and more. Support includes content assist and syntax check as well as CLI script execution and built-in PHP 5.5.7 binaries.

Faster Project Processing

The capability of flagging specific folders as PHP libraries, to identify code that's developed and deployed as part of your project but not actively maintained, and so does not require constant re-validation.

Improved Debugging Experience

With improved Xdebug & ZendDebugger configuration, Zend Studio can now automatically detect and validate your PHP binary or local debugging server settings.

EGit Integration

The integration of EGit 3.2 provides access to interactive rebase that allows you to quickly edit a series of commits, among other usability and performance improvements.

Getting Better With Every Release

Zend Studio 10.6 includes bug fixes and improvements, especially related to Remote System Support and working sets performance.

See Release Notes

What's New in Zend Studio 10.5

This release is significantly faster and provides major improvements for some of the most common technologies used in every-day PHP development, which will greatly enhance your Zend Studio experience. Key improvements include:

• Fastest Zend Studio ever - The latest release analyzes your projects up to twice as fast as previous releases, with improved responsiveness.
• Rewritten Composer support for much improved reliability
• Improved PHPUnit Integration with full support for PHPUnit 3.7
• Brand new PHPDocumentor 2 support
• Improved git support
• Updated version of Apache Cordova for mobile-app creation, bringing better performance and full support for Windows 8 apps
• Improved drag & drop designer

See Release Notes

What's New in Zend Studio 10

End-to-End Mobile App Development

Zend Studio simplifies creation of mobile applications with server back-ends so that even developers with no prior experience can quickly become successful. A WYSIWYG editor enables fast creation of portable mobile apps, while a visual service editor greatly simplifies the creation of RPC or RESTful data back-ends.

Testing mobile apps is much easier with a new integrated web services debugger, and a deployment process that allows testing via Web Mobile emulator or directly to real devices.

Once apps are built, Zend Studio 10 enables a simple workflow to create iOS, Android and Windows Phone mobile applications that can be published on their respective application stores, for maximum user reach and easy consumption.

Zend Framework 2 Support

• Developers can immediately start writing the business logic of their applications by creating a Zend Framework 2 module in a single click. Each new module is automatically registered and complete, saving programmers from needing to manually change files.
• All Zend Framework modules are re-usable. As a result, developers already have the plumbing in place to create new components or use them in someone else’s ZF application.
• Zend Framework 2 is one of the best, most popular and well-known implementations of the popular model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. Zend Studio 10 enables developers to easily create views, view helpers and controllers; combined with Zend Framework 2, developers can make MVC happen quickly and easily.
• Content assist in Zend Framework project enhances the experience of switching between many different controllers, view helpers and views (controller variables and view helper methods are visible inside view), supports services shared via Service Locator and makes working with configuration files easier. MVC Outline view helps to keep track of modules, controllers and views.

Use the Latest PHP Release and Benefit From Eclipse Platform Ecosystem

Staying up to date with the latest technologies is important. Zend Studio 10 supports development using PHP 5.4.11 and 5.3.21, giving developers the power of its new capabilities and syntax, such as traits. And it uses Eclipse as its base platform, leveraging its popular code editing capabilities and its ecosystem of plug-ins. You'll benefit from the many JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 editor improvements in Eclipse; try some Extra Features available for easy installation from Studio’s Welcome page!

See Release Notes

What's New in Zend Studio 9

Write code using PHP 5.4

New in Zend Studio 9.0.2, you can take advantage of workflows to quickly learn the new capabilities of PHP 5.4, including source code editing, CLI script execution, remote debugging and application deployment.

The most significant release of PHP since 2009, PHP 5.4 brings major performance and memory footprint improvements as well as new features like Traits.

Bootstrap your projects and start writing high quality code more quickly

Join the distributed version control revolution! Zend Studio 9 adds the ability to create projects right from Git and GitHub – in addition to other supported source control options like SVN and CVS.

You'll also benefit from the many JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 editor improvements in Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo), on which Zend Studio 9 is built.

Develop for the cloud more easily

Zend Studio 9 was designed with cloud development in mind. It allows you to code using the Zend Developer Cloud on phpcloud.com as your development runtime – now you can use an instantly available, consistent PHP environment that delivers superior debugging, increased productivity and collaboration in the cloud. It's also easier than ever to deploy PHP applications into any of several supported clouds.

And if you work with Amazon Web Services, you'll find it easier than ever to leverage services like EC2, S3, and others using the AWS toolkit built into Zend Studio 9.

Make sure your code is deployed properly

How many times have you pushed out code to your operations team only to encounter delays in deployment, incorrectly deployed code, or endless back-and-forth with operations on the right way to deploy?

Zend Studio 9 allows you to create consistent, reliable application packages that bundle PHP code, deployment scripts, and application metadata that can be handed to operations for deployment the right way, every time. Applications can be deployed on a number of Zend Application Fabric-enabled Clouds (RightScale, Amazon CloudFormation, IBM SmartCloud) as well as to on-premise Zend Server.

Use a faster and more lightweight IDE

We've listened to our users, who have said they want a more streamlined development environment that starts up and runs faster, and occupies a smaller footprint. Consequently, Zend Studio 9 was designed with these objectives in mind. Smart product configuration means that unneeded components aren't installed until required, resulting in up to 67% faster startup, 40% smaller disk footprint, and an overall snappier development experience.

See Release Notes