Today I gave another go for Zend Studio. I had tried it some months back, but at that time I wasn’t in the middle of active development and so I had only tried it very superficially. It appears to be the solution for PHP development (which, of course, is not that surprising since it comes from Zend)! It does everything I’m looking for.. but only for PHP. For JavaScript or CSS it provides syntax highlighting but no intellisense. Aptana, on the other hand, is continuing to gain ground as a stellar JavaScript/AJAX development platform and does those well, but only for JavaScript and CSS. The PHP code assist included in Aptana Milestone 9 can’t touch Zend Studio, unfortunately.
For now, it seems, my “Integrated” development environment is not so integrated at all as it consists of Aptana for JavaScript and CSS, Zend Studio for PHP, and—for the future c# projects—VisualStudio. Additionally I’ll continue to use UltraEdit (not UE Studio) for quick file viewing and touch-ups where a heavy environment is not needed.
I think I’ll need a third monitor to have Aptana and Zend Studio open and visible concurrently with all their panels. 😉