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

PDT features


Following is a more detailed listing of what each high-level PDT feature includes:

  • Editor

  • Inspection

  • Debugging

  • PDT preferences

Editor

The PHP editor provided by PDT goes way beyond simple text editing. Since it is aware of PHP syntax and top-level functions, it can offer functionality that other text editors cannot. As a result, it helps developers to output code faster and with fewer simple errors.

Syntax highlighting

PDT can parse and understand PHP. It will highlight keywords, properties and variables; thus making code easier to read.

Code assist

Type a few letters of a PHP function or class name and PDT will present you with matching properties or method names, complete with arguments and documentation if available.

Code folding

Configure PDT to hide DocBlocks, include sections, methods, and so on. Rather than showing each line of those sections, it can display only the first line and expand to show the full listing when you click the small plus sign next to the intro line. Code...