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 PHPEclipse

Finally, we will install the last component we need — the PHPEclipse plug-in. We need to grab the plug-in itself from the PHPEclipse site at SourceForge.

Historically, PHPEclipse was installed by unzipping an archive of directories and manually moving them into the plug-ins or features directory. The most recent versions of PHPEclipse, however, let us use the Eclipse update manager to handle the installation. In these instructions, we will use the historical method to install Eclipse since it is important to understand how the Eclipse plug-in directories work with each other. Also, going through this method introduces us to the official PHPEclipse site and the project site on SourceForge. If you wish to install with the newer method via the update manager, full instructions and walkthroughs are available in Appendix B.

PHPEclipse is a SourceForge project. SourceForge is a site that offers free communication and collaboration tools to the development teams of...