New Zend Studio plugins released
August 30th, 2005 | by admin | suraski.netTwo new plugins were officially released today by Zend.
First, a plugin that allows integration of PHP code snippets from zend.com’s code gallery, directly into Adobe GoLive. That replicates a feature that’s built into Zend Studio 4.0, and makes it available (for free) in Adobe’s HTML WYSIWIG editor, quite a nice addition for advanced PHP-aware designers.
And more interestingly from my point of view - a FireFox plugin that provides full Zend Studio integration with the browser (actually, the plugin is also available separately for Mozilla, so I guess you can count them as three).
The idea of integrating PHP debugging and profiling capabilities directly into the browser was introduced in Zend Studio 3.0, in the form of the Internet Explorer toolbar. Even though I’m far from being objective about the brilliance of this toolbar (…), it was very pleasing to see the tremendous feedback that it generated. Finally, it was possible to debug even the most annoying forms and most complicated pages, at a simple click of a button.
Internally at Zend, where a lot (not to say most) of the developers use Linux, it actually generated some angry “grr, when will it support Mozilla?#!$” feedback, which I silently ignored. Back then, I had very little faith in Mozilla, and I have to admit I dismissed it as a noble effort that will never actually be fruitful. Nonetheless, I wrote a simple XUL version of the toolbar that was used internally for quite some time.
Times have changed. Firefox has become the browser of choice for many users, including myself, and for the first time in years, a challenger is posing some serious competition to the IE monopoly. It was clearly time to take the Firefox userbase more seriously. A recent blog post by Davey Shafik made the need for a good Firefox plugin bluntly clear. Thankfully, by now we already had a rewritten plugin for Firefox, that arguably has more functionality than its IE cousin. Today it was finally officially released to the public.
One final interesting note about these plugins - they’re all written as scripts. Is the end of compiled languages for daily use nearing?
