Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By : Dirk Merkel
Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By: Dirk Merkel

Overview of this book

Even if you find writing PHP code easy, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is not so straightforward. Self-taught PHP developers and programmers transitioning from other languages often lack the knowledge to work with PHP on an enterprise level. They need to take their PHP development skills to that level by learning the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code.This book will enable you to take your PHP development skills to an enterprise level by teaching you the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code. You will learn how to perform activities such as unit testing, enforcing coding standards, automating deployment, and interactive debugging using tools created for PHP developers – all the information in one place. Your code will be more maintainable, efficient, and self-documented.From the design phase to actually deploying the application, you will learn concepts and apply them using the best-of-breed tools available in PHP.Experienced developers looking for expertise in PHP development will learn how to follow best practices within the world of PHP. The book contains many well-documented code samples and recipes that can be used as a starting point for producing quality code.Specifically, you will learn to design an application with UML, code it in Eclipse with PDT, document it with phpDocumentor, debug it interactively with Xdebug, test it by writing PHPUnit tests, manage source code in Subversion, speed up development and increase stability by using Zend Framework, pull everything together using continuous integration, and deploy the application automatically with Phing – all in one book. The author's experience in PHP development enables him to share insights on using enterprise tools, in a clear and friendly way.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Expert PHP 5 Tools
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Summary


I think we have come full circle within the course of this chapter. We started with a philosophical discussion; as well as an examination of the pros and cons of a common coding standard. We then proceeded to formulate a coding standard that can serve as a foundation for any PHP development project— whether it consists of a single developer or dozens spread throughout the globe.

Realizing that having a standard alone is not enough, we looked at PHP_CodeSniffer as a tool for validating code against a pre-defined standard. We even learned how to translate our coding guidelines to PHP code that PHP_CodeSniffer can use when checking the source files. Lastly, we briefly discussed that automating or integrating source validation is an effective way of actually enforcing the standard without having to waste too much time reviewing code manually.

The standard we defined in this chapter is not the answer to all your coding standard needs. I'm sure you were objecting to some of the rules I defined as you were reading through them. That's ok. The important thing is to have a coding standard at all. You can never make everybody happy, but you can make sure that the team benefits from the coding standard, even if the members don't agree with each and every detail.

Rather than blindly adopting the coding standard in this or any other standard for that matter, you might want to take the time to examine it and customize it for your purposes. Also, a coding standard evolves over time along with the language itself. With PHP6 due to be released in the near future, we will have to revisit our standard and see how to best improve it to reflect all the exciting new features.