One of my favorite things in IDEs, in my case Eclipse for Mac, is that they offer you the option of autocompletion. No developer knows the entire set of functions of the language he uses, neither the set of parameters of them. That’s why IDEs come to help.

In many cases when casting is not obvious and method call chain is to large your IDE may refuse to help you with this brilliant functionality. To be more precise let me give you an example.

In Zend Framework I was trying to fetch a RSS via Gdata interface. Something like that:

$videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads('youtube_username');
foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
    // do something
}

The problem is that whenever I try to do $entry-> in the body of the foreach loop I don’t see what methods are supported by the Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry class. So I tried to force the casting of $entry to this class definition and it worked like a charm for me. The thing I’ve done was to add a definition of $entry before the loop body:

$videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads('youtube_username');
$entry = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry();
foreach  ($videoFeed as $entry) {
    // do something
}

Than whenever you try to type $entry-> you’d receive a list of methods from the class definition of Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry.

Thanks to Roy Ganor there’s a more elegant way to do this, simply by adding @var comment:

/* @var $entry Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry */