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

CVS


The main reason we covered RCS in the previous section was to set the stage for our next trip down memory lane. As useful as RCS was and continues to be, it has some shortcomings that prevent it from scaling up and being used for projects involving multiple developers. But, as things go in the open source community, someone needing a more advanced tool had the skill and time to create this tool. In this case, that someone was Dick Grune and the tool he created was CVS.

Initially, the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) was not much more than a wrapper around RCS; a collection of scripts that added some features and provided a more powerful interface, but one that essentially continued to call on RCS to do the work behind the scenes. However, that architecture was replaced after a couple of years by one where all the underlying file manipulation is being done by code that is part of the CVS executable.

Among many small improvements, some of the major features CVS offered over RCS include...