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

Round-trip and one-way tools


At a basic level, you can use pen and paper to sketch out your UML diagrams. However, there is a good selection of software-based tools that will let you take things a step further by turning the diagram into basic code or vice versa. For example, a class diagram (which we will cover in detail later) describes the structure of various classes and their relationships. A properly constructed class diagram can be used to generate the classes represented by the diagram. Since the UML is a programming language agnostic tool, it is up to the UML authoring tool you are using whether a converter for your language of choice exists. If you look at UML diagramming tools, you will find that nearly all of them support Java. Your selection narrows if you are looking for a tool that is capable of generating PHP 5+ compliant PHP code. However, such tools are definitely available and we will be working with one later on in the chapter.

If supported by the tool, it is also possible...