PHPEclipse

A promise is a promise...
Enough of this chit-chat, back to work: I promised a first-day review of PHPEclipse and here goes.
Well, for one thing, I was right about memory consumption - I've been using Eclipse for three years now, and last year its IBM counterpart - Websphere Studio Application Developer. I can testify that the last beast was eating 1GB of memory for breakfast. Even so, PHPEclipse after a couple of hours of usage displayed a mild 150-170MB (including VM size). That is about 4 times higher then PHP Designer, but somewhat better than I expected.

On with the features...
Installation went fairly smoothly, partly because I was used to it.

• I looked up the first thing that was missing in PHP Designer - parameter aid. I used to press Ctrl+Shift+Space in the Java version of Eclipse and it would hint what parameters should be placed inside the parenthesis, after a method call. Sadly, it was missing here also. But hovering the mouse over the function name accomplishes the same thing, so all is not lost.
• Navigating through calls was there where I left it - Ctrl+hover over a function name and it will transform into a hyperlink. Click on it (with Ctrl depressed) and you will be transported to the function's declaration. It would have been nicer if it worked all the time - it didn't.
• Next, function autocomplete: PHP Designer used to complete only native PHP functions, such as mysql_query(). Eclipse however also suggests declared methods and variable for autocomplete.
• And definitely, the cherry was represented by real-time syntax highlighting and error reporting. In Java this meant that code was verified as soon as you typed it in, no need to compile. Actually, it was compiled, but in background. Sadly this feature is not as robust for PHP as it was for Java: it will detect basic syntax errors, mismatched parenthesis and such stuff, but not undeclared functions or variables.
• On the bright side, it does report when uninitialized variables are used, although that tends to get a bit annoying in a large project.
• Ctrl+Shift+H brings up the help for a (native) PHP function, if properly configured.
• TODO items are listed in the task box below the coding window - good thing I've spread these throughout the code.

Overall, this is a software upgrade in need of a hardware upgrade too. Eye candy does come with a price (although it's much more than this), but Eclipse's goal is to ultimately unify development experience for all languages. As far as I'm concerned, they are getting pretty close to that.