development plans for cedet / semantic / nxhtml

[Jack Tanner <ihok@hotmail.com>]

I'm asking this as a user, not a developer, but I think the question belongs 
here because it involves coordination of development plans. The short version of 
the question is: is there work afoot to create a nice IDE for writing web apps 
in a mixture of object-oriented PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML? If so, what 
will that involve? nXhtml? CEDET? Semantic? Other elements?

The long version is this. 

1) I'm using Emacs 23.2 and trying out the new CEDET / Semantic integration, and 
it's not quite "there" yet. For example, I enabled semantic-mode, and switched 
to a js-mode buffer. I keep getting this: "wisent-parse-stream: - Invalid start 
symbol bovine-inner-scope". Seems like a relative of the bug here:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.semantic/686

I could just file a bug report, although I don't know where this particular 
report belongs. But I can also imagine that since the CEDET / Semantic 
integration is completely new in 23.2, that the developers are aware of many 
little bugs, and such reports would just be noise to them and wasted time for 
me.

2) Upstream CEDET apparently has some support for PHP. I'm looking here:

http://cedet.sourceforge.net/languagesupport.shtml
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.cedet/4389

The Emacs 23.2 branch doesn't. Is that coming some day? If not, I should try to 
use upstream CEDET. But then I come across threads like this:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.cedet/4432

3) Right now, my IDE is essentially Emacs + nXhtml. It's working out OK, but 
there are some more sophisticated features I'd like to use (e.g., automated UML 
diagramming). Do CEDET and nXhtml play together? Or will they? What about 
features that both seem to want to provide, like completion?

At the end of the day, switching IDEs is not a trivial cost. The support and 
features of an IDE affect not only how you write code, but what kind of code you 
write. It plays into plans short-term and long. I can devote some chunk of time 
to getting a new environment working, but I don't want to do that if another 
reorganization with a steep learning curve is just down the road.