Category: IDE

[update] PHPStorm's upcoming subscription based licensing model and why you're fucked up

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** I’ve added an update. Click here to read it **

JetBrains has sent me an email today, mentioning about the upcoming change in their licensing model. Right now all users can renew their license at $49 which is a 50% discount rate of the original rate. From this November 2nd, you will be able to renew it for $119. Or you can buy a new license for $199/yr or $19.90/mo. Now, if you want to do some simple math, the upcoming yearly cost will be a whooping 100% increased price. If you go for monthly subscription, it will be like 141% extra of the current price.

Moreover there will be pain if you don’t want to continue. If you start with, for example V8, and in the middle of a yearly subscription V9 is released, but you don’t want to continue after the end of your subscription – you will be given a perpetual license of V8. You read it right, you will have to continue with V8 – not V9. Even though V9 was released during your subscription, you will not be allowed to keep using it. Huh!

Well, either way you’re pretty much fucked up. If you’re an existing license holder then you may find it slightly profitable to stick for the first two years because they said that there will be a 40% discount and 2nd year will be on them.

I am using PHPStorm since it’s version 3 and I am not going to renew it this time, for sure. I’ve been experimenting with Atom lately and it is pretty nice. Anyway, I am going to miss PHPStorm because I consider their upcoming licensing model is a kinda ripping-off of their loyal customers. Dear Jetbrains, Adios!

Update

Ok, it looks like I was comparing the pricing for company/organization instead of the personal licensing model. Their page content is pretty confusing, and it’s hard to get it right at the first sight. I’ve found the correct page with the pricing for personal/individual license and it’s not bad.

With this pricing, well, I think I don’t have any problem to renew it again. Thanks to @Gary Hockin and @Hadi Hariri from Jetbrains for clearing it up.

Getting comfy with PhpStorm – one of the best IDEs so far!

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Beside the frequently asked question “Which Framework is best?” this one is the top in category – “Which one is the best IDE”. People asks this question in morning, afternoon and evening. Every-time, everywhere. I am a big time fan of Netbeans and I left it a few days after it’s release of 6.7. It was so good, heavenly, yummy but I had to leave this old pal because of it’s extreme hunger to the available resources. There was only one thing that time which could compete with the resource hungry netbeans – that is FireFox. But hey, FF is not your IDE after all. Anyway, back to my point – I left Netbeans and started using PhpStorm. I have a company license and I am glad that I made this move. I am not going to preach PhpStorm in rest of this article, but what I will do is sharing my experience with PhpStorm 🙂

1. PhpStorm is fast: Not like a Bugatti Veyron beside your old 4 wheelers, but it’s fast. I was told that 64 bit version is even faster but that was not true in my macbook pro running snow leopard. rather I found that 64 bit version is slightly sluggish and more resource extensive. Whatever, when you make a jump from Netbeans to PhpStorm, you will really feel the speed of everything and if you keep an eye over your system memory, you will surely say “wow!”.

2. The best Javascript and X/HTML Intellisense: I am a javascript developer for almost 8 years by now. I have tried eclipse, some standalone components which could also run as eclipse plugin and Aptana. Aptana was good – I was using aptana mostly because of it’s auto-completion capability of javascript. But I really HATE eclipse. Why? – I will write a separate blog post on that. Now Netbeans has some capability of intellisense for Javascript but when it comes to jQuery (remember, I left NB at it’s 6.7th release) it was frustrating. PhpStorm really is beautiful for this. Just amazing! The format, the auto suggestion, the code completion everything works just perfect. This is one of the main reason why I am sticking with PhpStorm

3. Version Controlling: Ya ya I know, NB got that too. I am not a Netbeans hater, rather I love it. I love how amazingly it changed my world of coding by charging me nothing – zip, zilch nada! So it is merely a selling point for making a move from NB to PhpStorm – but the thing is, support for different VCS in PhpStorm is as good as like the other parts of it. It has fantastic support for Git and Svn, beautiful tools for merging and fixing the conflicts, refactoring and what not. I was feeling at home and to be honest, migrating from NB to PhpStorm didnt feel like I came to the land of aliens just for this. Without integrated support for VCS it would be impossible for me to stay with PhpStorm.

4. Less hungry: Though Steve Jobs said to stay hungry and foolish but please note that he said it only for humans, not to IDEs :P, lol! Ok, so PhpStorm is less hungry to CPU and Memory than NB. I just wish Firefox will be a performer like this one day 🙂 (different story again, sorry I am distracted with too many things at once)

5. Less Costly and a Friendly company: Phpstorm is a developer friendly company. I am using the licensed copy of Zend Studio since 2005 (I got that for free because of being a ZCE and because of winnign some competitions over time) but heck! Zend Studio is costly. That’s fine, Zend Studio is the PHP company and knows inside out of making a PHP IDE. But trust me, PhpStorm is not an alien thing at all – you will not feel “vim” with this excellent tool. PhpStorm can help you code PHP, HTML, CSS and JS with maximum comfort. Yet, it costs much less than other similar IDEs with similar feature set. And what did I mean by “Developer Friendly”? PhpStorm team listens to you. Most of the time you mail them for a discount, they give you some sort of discount without expecting anything from you (I love you, PhpStorm team for this). Even Elite in the class Zend Studio gives some discount some time. But try the same with Elite of the Elites like Coda. They wont take their time to say “Go, fuck yourself!” – I hate Coda, seriously! So rude!

Anyway – that’s a long story. I am very happy with PhpStorm and has recently upgraded my IDE from 2.x to 3.x with their one year full update support (even with major versions :D, Zend you should really think about that with Zend Studio) and living happily ever after. Love you PhpStorm, I really do!.

Get your 30 days trial version of PhpStorm from http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm and feel a whole different level of satisfaction 🙂 And surely, dont forget to check NetBeans too, that’s a beautiful piece of tool.

what is your favorite IDE/editor for writing code?

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hmm, tough question for me. i have (had actually) so many favorites depending on context. but definitely it’s interesting to write here about them

1. notepad – i am a notepad fan, for a very long time since 98 to 2006 and still i like it very much. but well, after that i’d found notepad++ and i liked it for it’s outstanding syntax highlighting features. if by any chance, i have to use windows these days, i work in notepad++

2. visual studio 6: yup, i must agree it is one of the best ide i’ve ever came in touch with. i have worked on visual basic for a long time (99 to 2006) and i was simply in love with visual studio ide. and it’s awesome intellisense + gui designer was the center of the attraction.

3. zend studio: i still use it. its one of my most favorite ide because of it’s os independent distribution. i like most of the features in it (SQL editor, subversion support, FTP etc) and ofcourse the feature to check the output of yourcode inside it. the object inspector is really a very cool feature. and i also use “find in files” feature very often to find the file i am particularly looking to edit. oh by the way – i use the old version (the non-eclipse version) and still use the 5.5.1 version for my everyday development.

4. phped: its a good editor for windows (never tried it’s linux version) but for some unknown reason i’ve failed to get used to with it.

5. netbeans: its superb 🙂 i like it very much. but as i am used to with zend studio i dont use it much. but i always suggest netbeans to someone who is looking for a decent and powerful ide for php (well, yeah also for java specially for the outstanding GUI designer for swing based apps)

6. aptana studio and spket ide : both of them are very very good for editing javascript. i use spket in linux for it’s small footprint. and aptana studio in my regular home and office machines.

6. nano – yeah it is the latest editor that i use almost everyday. you know it is available in both linux and mac. so i use it frequently in my local dev platform (mac osx based) and remote machines (linux based). and it is much more easier than vi – i know vi(m) is a very good editor and there are millions of user of vi(m), so what? if i can’t find it useful then i wont use it 🙂 – i find nano is very handy and easy to use. i have enabled php syntax highlighting in nano (via nanoarc) and it works really cool in shell 🙂

i dont like eclipse. there is no particular reason but for some unknown reason (i remember one, extremely resource hungriness and large footprint) i never feel comfortable with it. i use only one eclipse based ide (aptana) becoz there is no other good alternative to it. and only for this reason i also don’t use the new zend studio.

so hey, what is your favorite ide?