Book Image

PHPEclipse: A User Guide

Book Image

PHPEclipse: A User Guide

Overview of this book

The fusion of Eclipse, the leading open source development environment, and PHP is an exciting prospect for web developers. This book makes sure that you are up and running as quickly as possible, ready to take full advantage of PHPEclipse's tuned PHP development tools, without requiring any prior knowledge of Eclipse. You will begin with installing and configuring PHPEclipse, before moving onto a tour of the Eclipse environment, familiarizing you with its main components. As a plug-in to Eclipse, PHPEclipse is able to harness the platform to provide a rich and powerful development experience. For helping you improve the efficiency of your PHP coding, the book details the powerful editing features of PHPEclipse, and shows you how to use it to better organize your application code. You will see how PHPEclipse helps you throughout the development lifecycle, and learn how to use PHPEclipse's debugger to troubleshoot and step through your PHP code as it executes. The book rounds off with coverage of accessing databases and managing source code from within the. For the final step for your application, you will learn how to deploy your site to a production server."
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

PHPEclipse

The PHPEclipse project was started to address two problems. First and foremost, it brought PHP functionality to the Eclipse platform. Second, as good as Eclipse is for Java application development, it had its shortcomings as a web development IDE. Anyone who has developed web applications using traditional editors like Macromedia’s HomeSite or Bare Bones’ BBEdit know the annoyance of constantly switching to external applications during development — dropping into Query Analyzer to connect to a database or constantly hitting Refresh in a web browser just to see if your CSS modifications work.

The PHPEclipse plug-in has addressed both issues admirably by focusing on what PHP web developers typically need to create an application. Started in 2002, PHPEclipse’s development is active and its tool set provides everything that we need to write web applications in PHP.

The PHPEclipse package brings to Eclipse:

  • An excellent PHP editor that knows about PHP syntax and built-in functions
  • A debugger to help troubleshoot PHP code
  • phpDocumentor, a tool like JavaDoc, which helps us quickly create documentation for our code
  • An interface to SQL databases using the QuantumDB plug-in
  • Tools for deployment to production servers via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV

There are other great PHP IDEs like NuSphere’s PhpED and Zend’s Zend Studio that are great at writing PHP applications. There is also another PHP plug-in for Eclipse — Xored’s TruStudio. However, they too suffer from this same lack-of-integration drawback as the editors. None of these other packages comes with the breadth of external tools that PHPEclipse includes. Like Eclipse/PHPEclipse, you can write code quickly, but unlike Eclipse/PHPEclipse, you still need to use other programs to do other tasks. Most of all, Eclipse and PHPEclipse are free while the others require heavy licensing payments.