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

First line of defense: syntax check


One of the first things PHP does when you ask it to execute a piece of code is a syntax check. Basically, it goes through the code and makes sure that it conforms to the basic grammar of the language. Some of the questions the parser asks include:

  • Does a semicolon terminate every statement?

  • Do all the function calls reference functions that actually exist in PHP's namespace?

  • Are all language constructs in the code known to the parser?

If any problems are detected, the interpreter will generate an error message that is often detailed enough to pinpoint the problem and fix it. If you are reading the chapters of this book in order, you will already have seen the output of the syntax check in the chapter on Subversion. If you recall, we created a pre-commit hook script that checks the syntax of PHP scripts before they are being allowed to be committed to the repository.

The syntax check happens automatically when the interpreter starts up, but we can also invoke...