Getting started with Zend Studio for Eclipse: Views, Perspectives, and Workspaces

I am Peter MacIntyre and beginning with this post, I will start my series on Zend Studio at the OSSCube blog. Since, this is the first post, I will start with a rather straight forward topic; that of getting underway with setting up the programming environment in Zend Studio for Eclipse – the next generation in the Zend Studio IDE family. We will not cover the installation procedure as that is fairly easy on each platform.  We will just take a look at the environment after a fresh install.

In this series, I will write on a progressive basis showing the reader more Zend Studio for Eclipse tips, tricks, and best practices; so stay tuned, this is only the beginning.

What we will be doing in this post is to introduce you to the basic look of the Zend Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Take a look at the following image. This is the basic environment that you will see once you open Zend Studio for Eclipse (ZSE) for the first time and close the welcome screen. Here, there are a number of tabbed interfaces called views.

What is a view? Generally speaking every tab area in the Eclipse IDE is known as a View and a collection of views is known as a Perspective. One great thing about ZSE is that you can open and close, re-size, and relocate views. As well, you can save your re-arrangements as your own custom perspectives. ZSE comes with many pre-defined perspectives and this first one (shown in the image) is known as the PHP Perspective.

On the left hand side you will see a column showing the active project or projects in the PHP Explorer view. This view is where you can control all the files in a project or multiple projects. In this case we are looking at the ExampleProject and three entities that are attached to it.

When ZSE opens up it starts by looking for a Workspace. This is a folder on your development machine where all your projects are stored. You can have multiple workspace locations defined if you want. To change from one workspace to another simply use the file->Switch Workspace->Other menu combination to open up the dialog box that will allow you to select a different folder where you may have another workspace of projects defined. If you do decide to switch to a different workspace, ZSE will have to restart in order to read in all the associated settings and particulars that are defined for that new workspace.

That is all for my initial blog, stay tuned as we continue to dig deeper into ZSE and its many benefits, features, and integration points.

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