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

Starting Eclipse

To start Eclipse, double-click on the Eclipse application icon in your file system. You will be presented with the Workspace Launcher, a dialog box asking you to select your workspace. Remember, the workspace is the part of Eclipse that manages application resources — things like source code files and graphics.

Starting Eclipse

Immediately, we encounter a default Java-centric behavior of Eclipse that we will have to change. If we were creating regular Java applications, we would not care about Apache. Java code can be compiled at one location and the final binary files can be deployed at another location. Java source code does not need to be served by a web server, and thus, we can accept the default location that the workspace launcher presents. In multi-user workstations, we may change the location to a place underneath our user directory. Again, this is not a location accessible by our web server.

However, in PHP and web development, the location of our code matters. Apache serves...