For years now I have been looking for some IDE to replace my previously favoured Zend Studio (regarding versions up to 5.5 inclusively) serving high satisfaction. This time I stumbled over phpDesigner 7.2.5 … I haven’t heard of it before and so gave it a try.
This IDE is proposed to be lightning fast and commercially available at a very low price. The website is providing a 21-day trial version. Downloading and installing works straight-forward. On first start I’m used to testdrive each new PHP IDE with a task very common to me: opening SFTP folder for editing files remotely.
The icon in toolbar for opening file per FTP is found instantly and provides form gathering all data for connecting over FTP or SFTP. The form can be confirmed without providing a password, but connecting to server doesn’t seem to prompt for password then. This was at first glance. I tried to use FTP explorer panel to the right containing my freshly added server as single tree node. It took a moment to find my way to edit previous configuration of connection. After adding password I tried to reconnect to server, but clicking on tree-node didn’t cause anything. There was no “Reload” previously found in context menu of panel. Closing and restarting app didn’t help (funny: I even uninstalled and reinstalled app in between) as does opening “Connections” manager and clicking on Connect button for related setup. Finally I clicked on “Split” (some other unrelated button in FTP explorer) twice. This brought tree node back to life for reacting on click by trying to connect to server … again with a failure. Authentication failed … double checked hostname, username and password … to no avail. Reverted “Remote path” to / and tried browsing for it … expanding root node in provided remote browser resulted in failed authentication again.
This ain’t worth a cent … and it won’t improve my performance as a PHP developer in any way, so I closed app, deinstalled it and put it on my black list of apps. Finally I’m returning to my current best: Aptana Studio (which is another flavour of Eclipse/PDT in fact and thus suffering from similar limitations as the latter). It’s missing remote file search, it’s missing remote project support for having code completion for my custom remote project, but at least it’s stable enough to connect to remote server for editing file over SFTP …
