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

Perspectives

When you first launch Eclipse, you will be presented with this window:

Perspectives

The Eclipse interface comprises a specific grouping of tabs in a window. Across the top are the main toolbar and the shortcut toolbar. The main menu will either be above the main toolbar if you are on Windows and Linux or above the window title if you are on Macintosh systems.

Perspectives

In Eclipse, tabs are called views. A view has one specific function. A special tab that is used to edit a resource is called aneditor. Editors are used to write and edit source code.

A predefined layout of views and editors is called a perspective. Each perspective is geared towards a specific task or purpose. Java development has a perspective, debugging has a perspective, and so on. The PHPEclipse plug-in gives us a PHP perspective.

The developers of a plug-in collect all the views you need to do your tasks into a perspective. For example, the Java perspective gives us a view of all the methods in a class, a Java editor, a console, and...