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


If the example in this chapter did not sell you on the benefits of documenting your code using the phpDoc syntax, you only need to take a look at the API documentation of some of the biggest PHP projects out there, such as Zend Framework and Pear. There is a reason that this method of documenting source code has been around for over ten years. Programmers quickly get the big picture of how the various components come together. Moreover, it also allows them to drill down to the granular level of parameters, return values, and so on.

If you are not in the habit of commenting your code, I suggest you start slowly. Rather than documenting every single element, start with file and class-level DocBlocks. I suspect that you will quickly get used to creating documentation at the same time as code especially when you see the results in the form of detailed and useful documentation. Hopefully, you will feel encouraged enough to start documenting more elements and produce documentation that...