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

Introducing Xdebug


So far we have been talking about debugging PHP scripts by outputting info at one or more places in your code. Now it is time to look at a professional tool that will facilitate that activity. It also allows us to take things a step further.

Xdebug is a Zend extension that is able to hook into the internals of the PHP interpreter. With that ability comes added power over simply outputting debug information with echo statements. Among its many features, in this chapter we want to focus on the ones specifically designed to find, diagnose, and fix bugs. In particular, we will be looking at improved output of stack traces, function traces, and variables; as well as support for interactively debugging scripts locally and remotely.

In addition to the Xdebug features to be discussed below, it offers the following tools that we will look at in other chapters of this book:

  • Code Profiling allows you to optimize the performance of your application

  • Code Coverage Analysis feature will...