@var magic comment

This is a good example how people get used to a bad habits. @var magic comment has appeared first in early Zend Studio, and this is how it was used:

As you can see this magic comment makes content assist know what is the type of $test variable. With PDT 2.0 we have canceled this behaviour due to promising type inference engine, that can resolve variable back to the place where it was declared. For example:

As it turned out later this is not enough for most PHP developers as there are many cases where there's no reference from variable usage to its declaration (if declaration exists at all). One example has changed our mind, and we've decided to fix 260805, 249705 and 257481 ASAP.

One famous MVC framework magically allows to refer to View members from within .phtml script using $this variable. To support this you definitely need something to tell content assist that $this variable is actually an instance of some class even though it appears in a global scope...

Ouch... PHP is full of magic :)

PS: @var comment fixes are available in 2.1.0M7, but I suggest using latest integration build.

PHP 5.3 support in PDT: 1st stage is completed

For those of you who are desperately waiting for the PHP 5.3 support in PDT - check out tommorrow's nightly build for the 2.1/HEAD branch. Here's a list of basic features that where defined for the first stage:

Choosing PHP version when creating a new PHP project...

Basic code assit for new keywords...

PHP 5.3 syntax support: syntax highlighting, no errors in Problem View; sorry for the mess - I tried to put all new language features into one PHP code snippet :-) 

The next stage will be modeling namespaces... Be prepared, DLTK...

PS: you know the address where you can report bugs, right? :)

On improving the PHP Inference Engine...

Just committed a new Type Inference "rule" into the PDT 2.1 branch. The following picture illustrates it better :)

PDT 2.0 Released!

4 days ago PHP Development Tools 2.0 was released, and 20,000 of "early birds" had downloaded and started evaluating its new features. If I'd characterize this release in a few words, I'd concentrate on the following topics:

• PHP Inference Engine: code based Completion and Navigation Engines, Type Hierarchy, Marc Occurrences, Override Indicators, and more...
  
• Improved Performance and Scallability: faster startup; RAM usage is limited, irregardless how many projects are open.
• Build Path: separate project resources from your source code.

And the most important thing is that we're really getting a lot of help from the community: people participate in the newsgroup, ask and answer questions in the IRC channel, report bugs. I really appreciate your help!