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nWire Eclipse Zend Plugin Review

PHPRO.ORG receives many emails requesting reviews for magazines, web sites, application development tools, applications, books etc. Now and again, one of these catches the eye and deserves further inspection. Recently, a request for a product called nWire arrived which allegedly "accelerates PHP development by helping developers navigate through their code and better understand the architecture of their application". Here is a closer look at nWire.

At first glance, from the provided screen shots, this looked to be a mac only application, as they were the only shots provided. Still, we plunged on..

The nWire promise to accelerate development by helping navigate code, and better understand the application architecture, would seem to suggest the application is targeted at coders who do not know what they are doing. If a programmer, in any language, has no understanding of the system architecture, or is unable to accomplish simple navigation throughout the code base, one must question the skills of the programmer. Eclipse, like many other IDE's for PHP already provides the required navigation of classes and methods within. Even without such a tool, the developer at should at all times have an understanding of the application architecture, and how to access the logic.

It would seem the application allows the developer to build a database of things, as a developer, they should already know. This is quite useful for new comers with little understanding of structure, but paves the way for lazy coding practices when this style of development is embraced. For too long PHP has been much maligned as "insecure" due to such practices from new comers.

Upon reading further into the features of nWire, it boasts "Upon opening a PHP file, the nWire Navigator .... and the file that's open is "CopyOnWriteArrayList.java". The assumption that if it was nWire for PHP, it would shown working with, well, PHP. A further boast reveals Symbols searching and other features already present in Eclipse.

A quick look fails to show how this application will work with dynamic invocations and autoload, which are now used widely in PHP.

In short, the nWire application offers little to experienced coder, and little to the new comers to PHP, except the possibility of promoting poor programming practices.