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

Automating deployment


Now that we are clear on what we are trying to achieve, let's start exploring the tools we will be using to implement and automate our deployment plan. Although we will enlist a handful of supporting utilities to get the job done, the tool we will be looking towards to automate the whole process and perform most of the tasks is called Phing.

Phing

Phing is a project build system. The name is actually a recursive acronym and stands for "PHing Is Not Gnu Make." Phing allows you to perform all kinds of tasks associated with building software. It's especially great for automating tasks, which is exactly what we have been discussing in the first part of this chapter.

Although Phing goes so far as to disavow any association with the utility make, it is pretty safe to say that make is part of Phing's heritage. However, Phing has been modeled much more closely after Ant, Java's predominant build tool, than anything else.

Using Phing instead of Ant has the advantage that it supports...