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

Chapter 5. Debugging

I started debugging the first time I was asked to code the obligatory "Hello World" program. It's just something that comes with the territory. If you write code, you create bugs. Hopefully you will be able to find most of them by the time your code reaches your application's users.

There are many kinds of bugs that range in complexity from glaringly obvious to nearly impossible to figure out. Knowing that they are out there hiding in your code, we will look at tools for finding and eradicating them in this chapter. Specifically, we will look at configuration options, constants, and functions that are useful when debugging. Armed with that knowledge, we will construct a general-purpose class we can include in our projects for easy debugging. Finally, we will learn how to use Xdebug and Eclipse to interactively debug code running locally or on the server.

First line of defense: syntax check

One of the first things PHP does when you ask it to execute a piece of code is a...