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

Basic Eclipse concepts


Eclipse uses certain concepts in constructing a user interface. Getting the definition of those basic concepts out of the way, will make the following discussion much easier.

Workspace

On a physical level, your workspace is based on a folder or directory in which you keep your projects. It also includes all external files and resources that Eclipse knows about. However, a workspace is much more than a collection of files. It also represents the relationships between the files, objects, and actions you can take on them. You can think of the workspace as everything there is, but not necessarily all you can see at any given moment.

You can have any number of workspaces. For example, you might have a workspace for PHP projects and another for Java projects. Although, there is no requirement that you cannot keep projects with a variety of underlying technologies in the same workspace. Another reason to keep distinct workspaces might be to separate work projects from personal...