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

Why Eclipse?


Eclipse grew out of technology and concepts at IBM. Prior to being announced as an open source project in 2001, it already had several years of development and evolution under its belt. Since then, thousands of developers have contributed and continue to contribute to the project. This means that many of the core concepts and implementations of Eclipse are quite mature. Moreover, the project was put into the hands of a newly formed not-for-profit foundation in 2004. In other words, Eclipse is here to stay and is unlikely to disappear overnight like some software projects.

Another advantage of using Eclipse is that it has found wide acceptance. No matter whether you are doing development in PHP, Java, Perl, or C++, there is a community of users and developers ready to lend a hand if you need support. As we will see shortly, efforts to make Eclipse a strong tool for PHP development are backed and driven by Zend—probably the biggest commercial name in PHP.

Eclipse is not so much...