Komodo 4.2 IDE review

I downloaded and installed the Komodo 4.2 IDE which is supposed to create an environment to enable you to debug javascript and php code. It claimed to also give you help/prompts on Drupal API. Some users posted their success with it on the drupal.org site.

I'm using Suse 10 64 bit Linux, 64 bit Firefox 2.x, PHP 5.x, and AMD 64 bit CPU.

The install went easy. The startup page came with 2 tutorials that came with sample projects.

I first tried the javascript tutorial. It should have given you a way to debug javascript. I could not get it to stop in the debugger. All the messages and status windows said everything was set up properly and listening properly. But no debugger stop.

I then updated everything on my machine thinking maybe I had an old browser with old plug-ins. Then tried again. Still nothing.

I next moved on to the php tutorial. It was even worse. The instructions in the tutorial were bad. The menu commands and screens referred to in the tutorial did not exist. I found an equivalent and configured it for debugging. But again the debugger would never run and would never stop. And I couldn't even get the php code to run without the debugger.

There may be a way to get Komodo IDE to work. But at $299 I didn't feel like I should spend hours of my time figuring it out. I spent at least 4 hours working on it. Then gave up.

I'll be trying Eclipse PDT and Zend debugger. The last time I used Eclipse on Linux it didn't work that well. I'm hoping the latest version has improved with both speed and with display.