I use Sublime Text at home and at work, but recently my colleagues at work have been trying to convince me to go back to using an IDE in the form of PhpStorm from JetBrains. With the recent release of PhpStorm 7, I thought this was a good opportunity to grab a trail version and give it a go.

Unfortunately however in their requirements section under Linux, they state the following:

Oracle (Sun) JDK 1.6 or higher. Open JDK is not supported.

Bummer. I can think of at least two reasons why I try to avoid installing the Oracle JDK on my own machines:

1. It is a manual installation, not yum based. Oracle do not provide a yum repo for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS.
2. As it is not yum based, running "yum update" will not get me the latest version of Java with all of the security fixes (and we all know how often that is required).

Being curious, I tried to run it under the Open JDK regardless, and can confirm that it does appear to work on Fedora 19 using the Open JDK, but it is slow on my machine (i7 with 8GB of RAM and an SSD). In fairness though it does make it clear with this warning message when you run it that this is to be expected:

"./phpstorm.sh WARNING: You are launching the IDE using OpenJDK Java runtime.
         ITS KNOWN TO HAVE PERFORMANCE AND GRAPHICS ISSUES!
         SWITCH TO THE ORACLE(SUN) JDK BEFORE REPORTING PROBLEMS!
NOTE: If you have both Oracle (Sun) JDK and OpenJDK installed please validate either 
WEBIDE_JDK, JDK_HOME, or JAVA_HOME environment variable points to valid Oracle (Sun) 
JDK installation. See http://ow.ly/6TuKQ for more info on switching default JDK."

So yeah, I guess they weren't kidding in their list of requirements. Oracle JDK or suffer a degraded performance. I'll pass for now as I am pretty happy with Sublime Text, but I am hearing a lot of praise for PhpStorm.

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Updated 2023 : note that the above post was originally published in 2013 and is outdated, but is left here for archival purposes. I have fixed some broken links where possible, and removed dead ones.