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 Apache/PHP

We will need to turn our desktop machine into an Apache web server running PHP. This will take care of the server part of client/server. The goal is to simulate the production environment. By closely imitating the production environment, we will catch any problem before the program is released to the world.

Windows

The easiest way to install Apache and PHP on Windows is by using XAMPP project’s XAMPP package. The XAMPP project packages Apache, MySQL, and PHP into one, easy-to-install directory. In addition, the XAMPP package installs FileZilla, FTP server and client, Mercury mail server, Webalizer web log analysis software, and phpMyAdmin — a web GUI to administer MySQL.

To install XAMPP, download it from the official XAMPP site at http://www.apachefriends.org/ en/xampp.html. The XAMPP package comes in either as an installer, zip archive, or an executable self-extracting zip file. The installer is a quick and easy way to install XAMPP so we will recommend...