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

Summary


Although there are many things to consider when picking a development framework, you can't really go wrong with most of the established and actively maintained ones. Frameworks like Cake, Symfony, and Zend Framework overlap to a large degree in terms of the problems they solve. However, you can make your life easier by doing your homework and selecting a framework that suits your development philosophy and style. After reading this chapter, you should be able to look at the offering of frameworks out there and ask the right questions to narrow down the field.

Although I used Zend Framework as an example to show what a framework can add to your development effort, I certainly urge you to consider other options. I like that most of the ZF components are pretty loosely coupled. Although, the Zend_Application module in conjunction with ZF's full MVC implementation doesn't feel quite as loosely coupled as ZF used to. Either way, it is still possible to add individual ZF modules to your...