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

Chapter 1. Overview of Eclipse and PHPEclipse

The impact that the Eclipse Platform has made on application development is amazing and unprecedented in many ways. From the story of its birth to its wide feature set, there is nothing bland about this product. The Platform has created commercial product opportunities around it and gives a bountiful amount of freedom and control to end users. This has led to widespread industry adoption and corporate support.

The Platform’s best known component, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), alone is on par with, if not outright excels against, many similar commercial offerings. Originally a Java IDE, Eclipse makes an excellent PHP development environment with the help of the PHPEclipse plug-in. PHP developers experienced with IDEs will enjoy its extensibility and power and if you have never used an IDE on a PHP project, Eclipse is a great tool to get started with. It has everything you would need in an IDE, runs on many platforms, and best of all, it’s completely free.