TSW WebCoder 2010 sneak-peek part 4: Improved PHP IntelliSense
March 19, 2010
One of the things that I find my self trying to improve all the time, is the IntelliSense in WebCoder. As you will see in future posts, WebCoder 2010 will come with a bunch of very cool IntelliSense additions, and the PHP IntelliSense is of course one of them. Here's a couple of examples on what I've done:
Support for nested objects, where you can access members of members of an object. The screenshot should tell it all :)
PHP's own classes have been added to the IntelliSense along with all the usual stuff like functions and reserved words, and of course, you can even see members of the built-in PHP classes, like on the screenshot where we use the DOMDocument class.
Now imagine a situation like on this next screenshot: You get something that you know is an object of a specific class, but since PHP is so dynamic, there is really no way for WebCoder to know which class it is. That will leave you without IntelliSense, which is always a shame. However, in WebCoder 2010, I've added some cool intelligence, allowing WebCoder to try to guess which class you're using. It looks at the members you have already used on a variable, and if it can find one single class with these members, it offers you the IntelliSense we all know and love. Have a look at the next screenshot, where I've helped WebCoder by using a member only found on ClassOne, allowing WebCoder to guess the class:
Pretty cool, right? These are all somewhat small features, but I feel that they make a big difference, and coding with them through the last couple of months has been great! I hope you like it all, and stay tuned for the next time, where I bring you yet another cool feature of WebCoder 2010. In the meantime, let me know what you think of the features presented in this post :)
Very nice !
Outstanding!
Yet another feature I look forward to enjoy :) Keep up the great, innovative work :) PS When do you expect to release the first beta version?
I can’t wait to get my hands on the beta of WebCoder2010
I just hope that this “guess search” doesn’t take too much time when typing so the software will lag when finding/showing possible methods.
But it looks awesome. Can’t wait to try it and see how “deep” it goes. ;)
Thank you for the kind words, guys.
Pelle, it won’t take any extra time at all, actually. The information used is already collected by the IntelliSense, so finding it is merely a matter of looking through in-memory representations of your classes, which is very, very fast. So unless you have 100.000 complex classes in your project, I don’t think you will even notice it at all :)