Book Image

PHPEclipse: A User Guide

Book Image

PHPEclipse: A User Guide

Overview of this book

The fusion of Eclipse, the leading open source development environment, and PHP is an exciting prospect for web developers. This book makes sure that you are up and running as quickly as possible, ready to take full advantage of PHPEclipse's tuned PHP development tools, without requiring any prior knowledge of Eclipse. You will begin with installing and configuring PHPEclipse, before moving onto a tour of the Eclipse environment, familiarizing you with its main components. As a plug-in to Eclipse, PHPEclipse is able to harness the platform to provide a rich and powerful development experience. For helping you improve the efficiency of your PHP coding, the book details the powerful editing features of PHPEclipse, and shows you how to use it to better organize your application code. You will see how PHPEclipse helps you throughout the development lifecycle, and learn how to use PHPEclipse's debugger to troubleshoot and step through your PHP code as it executes. The book rounds off with coverage of accessing databases and managing source code from within the. For the final step for your application, you will learn how to deploy your site to a production server."
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Installing New Plug-Ins

The Eclipse Update Manager works by keeping track of the home update site of each plug-in. Eclipse aggregates this information in a file named platform.xml in the /configuration/ org.eclipse.update directory. To install a new plug-in, we need to tell the Update Manager where to grab it. We will walk through this process using the installation of PHPEclipse as an example.

Launch the Eclipse Update Manager. Select Search for new features to install and then click on the Next button. We will be presented with a list of software site bookmarks.

Installing New Plug-Ins

By default, Eclipse.org update site is pre-loaded so that Eclipse can update itself. This is a graphical, bookmark representation of the information stored in the features directory. You can edit and manage all your update sites by returning to this screen. Each bookmark in this list will be checked in the future when Eclipse searches for updates. When we add a bookmark for PHPEclipse, we are not only installing the plug-in, we...