IDE Duel -- Zend Studio 7 or Dreamweaver CS4

Question

I'm developing PHP apps that leverage several frameworks (though not the Zend Framework yet...) and I make good use of Javascript (mostly jQuery). All mark-up is XHTML, of course, with CSS, etc. I'm looking to move beyond the beautiful simplicity of Notepad++. I'm using Windows Vista. I'm trying to decide between Zend Studio 7 or Dreamweaver CS4.

They seem pretty on par with each other, but the price points are different. I've seen a few lists of "Good things about Dreamweaver" or "Good things about Zend Studio" but I've yet to find a head-to-head comparison.

Any suggestions on the next IDE to move up to? In addition to the language support and basic error checking (syntax-related, like missing semi-colons or something), I'm looking for two things that are absolutely necessary:

1. "Projects" or something similar -- open a project and it gives a tree listing of all related files beneath. I'm pretty sure both support this.
2. As lightweight as possible. Vista's a hog as it is, and I'd like to have a lightweight enough IDE that having 10 files open and moving between them won't drain my resources.

Other niceties:

• Automatic documentation (not sure what the phrase is, the stuff in comments above functions with the @parm stuff).
• Templating.
• SVN support.
• FTP/File upload capabilities.

... And, if Zend or Dreamweaver isn't the thing -- any suggestions about what is?

Answer 1

i would suggest Netbease IDE PHP 6.7.

In is free , not so huge like Zend Studio or Dreamweaver.

It has support for

Syntax-highlighting
Templates PHP Unit JQuery Dojo Code completion for JS / PHP / HTML Version Control (SVN)

and much more..

Download Netbeans