NuSphere PhpEd - Questions and Answers

[stuart]

Nusphere have kindly agreed to offer answers to any question you may have regarding their IDE. So here is your chance to ask what you have always wanted to.

I'll start off by asking these:

1. Nusphere, how long have you been working on your PhpEd IDE solution?

2. What are you plans for the future and how to you intend to enhance your IDE?

3. What are your current pricing structures?

Thanks,
Stuart

[gitmans]

1. Nusphere, how long have you been working on your PhpEd IDE solution?

Hi there, here is a little history :-)

PhpED was actually born before NuSphere came about. It was first written in Turkey by Ergin Soysal, who was eventually hired by NuSphere. The real breakthrough came in 2001, when Dmitri Dmitrienko met with NuSphere people in Frankfurt at PHP Conference. Dmitry's Php debugger - dbg has always been part of PhpED,but with Dmitry taking over NuSphere's development, dbg became trully integrated in the IDE. NuSphere PhpEd development team has grown since that and so has the product - there is really nothing left of the original source code. Early version of PhpED was actually ideal base for future development because it fit very well in the 3 fundamental principles of NuSphere GUI tools development:
1. User is the king, virtually everything needs to be configurable in the IDE. Even the tabs can be docked and undocked in PhpED
2. User can't wait for IDE to perform any operation - IDE has to be built on Native, fast User Interface platform and tuned for performance
3. PHP IDE worth nothing if it doesn't have a great debugger. Debugger is by far the biggest contributor to productivity of the User.
We've been at doing it for more than 5 years now.

[gitmans]

2. What are you plans for the future and how to you intend to enhance your IDE?
Hey, it is going to be Voice Activated and all in 3d!! Ain't it great?I am Sorry, no, this is not going to happen any time soon. But not to worry, the future is stil very bright!
As a matter of policy we are somewhat reluctant to talk about specific features that are coming in the nearest future. The problem is copy/cat by competition - we do get copied and we are very Proud of that! sometimes we even talk about doing something really, really stupid - just to see if that gest copied ...
Seriously though. We have huge plans, our product management is unstoppable. 100% of the things we are planning for are customer driven.
- I think I won't be giving away any secrets if I tell you that code folding is coming - our users, who have or will purchase PhpED 4.6 will get code folding as free upgrade sometime in near future
- There are numerous requests to enchance DB Wizzard and possibly db client, so it is coming
- Full support for Firefox browser is on its way
- Enchancing the setup of PhpED Project mappings and making the setup for remote debugging very easy - definetely is being worked on.
It is actually preatty easy to find out what is coming in PhpED - just take a look at our Forums Feature Request section.
BTW, we just released PhpDock the brand new PHP deployement solution, which provides various ways for running and configuring PHP applications - we are planning lots of enchancements there as well.

[gitmans]

3. What are your current pricing structures?
We made a dramatic switch in our pricing policies last Summer, when we released PhpED 4.6. We no longer asking our customers to pay for each upgrade - even though we firmly beleive that we provided enough value in each version that made it worth it.
As with everything that NuSphere does, we have a philosophy behind the decision. We had a talk among ourselves and somebody (probably the sales guyI think) made a very interesting statement. He said: Very often our customers are paying their own money for the product - quite often these developers are freelance or represent very small organizations. Imagine paying your OWN money for the IDE. We better make it worth it - and we are pretty sure we did.
- We have our flagmanship product PhpED Professional, which comes with 1 year of free upgardes and tech support
- We also offer PhpED Advantage - same product, but with 3 years of support and upgrades
- Our lighter version is PhpED standard, which is targeted for students and PHP beginners, as well as for everybody who doesn't use most of PhpED IDE features but still needs a great editor and great debugger
- we have "value packs" - buy 3 get one free deal with Team 4
- we offer products in both download only and physical CDs forms. (CDs cost more)
- we have various discounts for government, non-profits, educational and full-time students
You can check out our prices and compare versions:http://www.nusphere.com/products/phped_verscomp.htm
And please don't hesitate to submit your questions through contact us form here: http://shop.nusphere.com/contact_us/index.php