Cheers for taking the time to reply :)

If it hadn’t had 2Gb RAM I wouldn’t have bought it. That’s enough that I can safely run Eclipse x 2 + Xcode + OpenOffice + several hundred web browser windows + a handful of graphics apps (2 bitmap apps, one vector app) … and everything’s fine.

Eclipse does get swapped out to disk a bit more aggressively than other OS X apps, I’ve noticed. I don’t know if that’s due to eclipse’s code, or because OS X is giving the “more native” apps some kind of preference. If you stop using Eclipse for a day or two, and churn some other big apps in and out, you might have to wait 5-7 seconds for it to fully load back into RAM.

I’m a heavy Eclipse Java user and looking at the air for my commute, but need to know it is useable every day for eclipse development.

Cheers

So…IMHO: nice idea but currently a waste of time.

http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html

all are free and open source:
1. http://www.zend.com/community/pdt
2. http://devzone.zend.com/public/view

It’s just been consistently over-complicated and under-explained to get started with. It has a very steep learning curve *to no benefit* – there’s nothing inherent in the application or it’s use-cases that requires that much complexity and opaqueness (i.e. AFAICS most of the complexity could be automated with no loss of flexibility or user-control).

Obviously, any change requires manpower, so I’m sure it will get fixed “eventually” but in the meantime it’s just not a nice experience for first time users :(.

However, nowadays IDE’s have advanced so much that I consider it foolish in the extreme to do any programming without one, and there are so many *free* IDE’s of awesome power that I see it as pretty much inexcusable too.

I agree that this is largely Eclipse’s “fault” – but OTOH the eclipse maintainers have no responsibility for what is done with plugins, and some plugin authors do what it takes to make Eclipse installs tractable, so I can see that you could argue it either way.

re: IDE usage … I guess that there are still people who hate re-factoring, or refuse to do TDD, or “don’t trust” build systems, or who use no libraries and few functions in any of their programming (I’ve met people like that, so I know at least *some* exist, somewhere). They could all get away without an IDE. But I think most of us are addicted, and can’t. Personally, I refuse to do any programming without a refactoring IDE – what’s the damn point? Overall these kinds of things massively increase your productivity and remove wasted + lost time. At no cost. What’s not to love?

Sadly, having used Netbeans (and it’s precursors) a lot, I hate it with a passion. I re-try it about once every 1.5 years, and each time it quickly brings back so many painful memories that I run away screaming.

Well, not really :), and I haven’t tried NB 6, so I’m overdue a re-eval – maybe I can finally banish those demons ? :) … so far, IME it has consistently been “not as good as Eclipse” since Eclipse became viable. The performance monitoring from NB 5 (IIRC) was much better than Eclipse, and so for a while I used both in parallel, but NB was painful even just using it for that.

Most of your problems stem not from the fact that PHP development is hard on a Mac, but that Eclipse is a total PITA. But, you know, if you want an IDE for PHP development, it probably is your best option.

And to say that “OS X can’t unzip the files”; well, it can, just fine, and you do it from the terminal. Whilst the Eclipse way of unzipping into existing folders isn’t the default, you can either (as you prove) use the terminal (which means that OSX *can* unzip the files) or you can unzip it elsewhere and just drag stuff over.

Alternatively, a decent text-editor with highlighting, syntax completion, code snippets, preview and project handling (for instance, Textmate) is a single-click install, and then you just need to enable that PHP5 module in your apache2.conf and you’re off, developing inside ~/Sites .

I understand that your goal was to use Eclipse, but I’m really not sure why, when much more straightforward (and just as effective) solutions exist. To leap from “I wanted to develop some PHP” into “I need Eclipse” clearly is more of a can of worms on OSX than other platforms, but other development enviroments, and paradigms, are available.

1. I don’t have Stuffit Expander because OS X’s builtin archive expander works just fine.

2. You might want to look at NetBeans. 6.5 is meant to have much better <a href=”http://www.netbeans.org/kb/trails/php.html”PHP support. I tried NetBeans for Ruby and found it to be lots better than the equivalent Eclipse plugin. Just to warn you: 6.5 is currently RC and due to be released properly “any day now”.