Hi PDT team and fellows,
Perhaps you have heard about the Language Server Protocol [1] and
its integration with the Eclipse IDE, a.k.a. LSP4E [2].
In a nutshell, the idea is that the intellisense for IDE/editors is
provided by external processes - language servers. The communication
is done through a standard protocol - the Language Server Protocol.
This way the intellisense is decoupled from the IDE and can be
shared across the different IDE/editors on the market. The language
server can be implemented in any programming language - ideally in
the language it provides the intellisense for. Thus, the communities
around each programming language can be involved in the development
of the language servers.
This whole initiative has an amazing support so far. There are
language servers implemented for lots of languages [3], including
for PHP. The PHP Language Server [4] is implemented in pure PHP and
is reusing existing PHP tools like the PHP Parser and
PHP_CodeSniffer. It already attracts contributions by PHP developers
and it has really the potential to become the best intellisense
implementation for PHP.
As we (the Zend team) believe in the long term success of this whole
idea, we started an integration of the PHP Language Server with the
Eclipse IDE. It is still in an early stage and cannot compare to the
existing functionality in PDT, but in the long term it can really
replace large parts of PDT.
The current state is already quite usable and is available on a
GitHub repo at EclipseLabs [5]. A ready-to-use update site is
already available. Check the README fie.
We hope you like the idea and join the effort by contributing to
either the PHP Language Server or LSP4E projects.
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol
[2] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.lsp4e
[3]
https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/wiki/Protocol-Implementations
[4] https://github.com/felixfbecker/php-language-server
[5] https://github.com/eclipselabs/lsp4e-php
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