This book will enable you to take your PHP development skills to an enterprise level by teaching 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-documenting.
Chapter 1, Coding Style and Standards, explains how to define a coding standard that suits your development process and how to enforce it using PHP_CodeSniffer.
Chapter 2, Documentation with phpDocumentor, explains how to properly document your code with phpDocumentor and generate well formatted developer documentation.
Chapter 3, The Eclipse Integrated Development Environment, explains how to install, customize, and use the free PDT plug-in for Eclipse to create a powerful IDE for PHP development
Chapter 4, Source Code and Version Control, explores the ins and outs of subversion for distributed version control for development teams. It also teaches you to extend subversion functionality with PHP scripts.
Chapter 5, Debugging, teaches you to write your own flexible debugging library and master remote interactive debugging with Xdebug.
Chapter 6, PHP Frameworks, explains how to evaluate, compare, and choose frameworks that suit your projects and development style. Master the most commonly used modules of Zend Framework.
Chapter 7, Testing, explains testing methods and types, unit testing, creating comprehensive test suites with PHPUnit, and test-driven development.
Chapter 8, Application Deployment, states guidelines for automated and reversible application deployment, automating upgrades and deployments with Phing
Chapter 9, PHP Application Design with UML, introduces the reader to UML, class diagrams, sequence diagrams, and use cases.
Chapter 10, Continuous Integration, explains how to use CI, keep costs down and save time by discovering bugs and conflicts in your projects, at an early stage.
To follow along with the examples, you will need a working version of PHP 5 installed on your system. Some of the chapters rely on command line tools such as pear and pecl, which are included in the standard distribution of PHP. Version 5.2.x of PHP or higher is recommended for maximum compatibility with the sample code. If you do not already have PHP installed on your system, you can download it from php.net here:
http://www.php.net/downloads.php
Although this book was written and coded on OS X, any flavor of MS Windows or Linux will do the job as well. Basic familiarity with your system's command line and a handy text editor for tweaking the examples will also be helpful.
This book has been written for professional developers new to PHP and experienced PHP developers, who want to take their skills to the next level by learning enterprise level tools and techniques.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
<fileset dir="${project.home}/build" >
<include name="*.properties" />
<exclude name="deprecated.properties" />
</fileset>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:
<fileset dir="${project.home}/build" >
<include name="*.properties" />
<exclude name="deprecated.properties" />
</fileset>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ phing upgrade-db
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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