The quick pitch for Rogue Wave Software's Zend Studio, recently updated to version 13.6, is "the PHP IDE for smarter development". Zend Studio 13.6, says Rogue Wave, offers 3X faster performance in indexing, validation and searching of PHP code, and it allows users to code faster, debug more easily and leverage the massive performance gains in PHP 7. It is the next-generation PHP IDE designed to create high-quality PHP apps while boosting developer productivity. The platform automatically scales according to the DPI settings of the underlying operating system and supports HiDPI monitors.

The main focus in this new release is the support for PHP 7.1, which contains useful language improvements like nullable types, void return type and catching multiple exception types. Additional feature improvements relate to Composer and JavaScript tooling, and Zend Studio 13.6 takes advantage of the tern.js intellisense engine, providing intellisense for a long list of JavaScript frameworks, namely AngularJS, Closure, CordovaJS, Dojo, ExtJS, jQuery and Node.js.

Finally, the release comes with the latest and greatest release of the Eclipse Platform, Neon.3, which brings with it its own slew of improvements.