Zend, the PHP Company, took a major step back with their PHP IDE when they moved it too the eclipse platform. I’m not a fan of eclipse, I don’t even like using it for Java development - which its built for. Zend Studio 6 is slow, clunky, the user interface is confusing, the FTP component is horrible.

If you can name it, Zend 5.5 beats Zend 6 at it, except for javascript support. However, I only need a JavaScript IDE for when I am doing heavy JavaScript coding or debugging. The worst part about Zend Studio 6 is the FTP component. Every time you save a file - it refreshes the folders and closes them all. So you can to open the folder again and wait everytime you make a save! Finally I decided to update the program hoping they had fixed this bug. When I updated to the latest version I was no longer able to connect to most of the FTP servers I had (roughly 10), one of which was to this domain.

At the point I uninstalled and went back to Zend 5.5 and wrote this article. Flat out, Zend Studio 6 sucks.