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

Summary

Eclipse uses perspectives to accomplish tasks. A perspective is designed to do one thing — for example, debug an application, view a database. Views are the individual tasks. A perspective uses several groups of views to accomplish its mission. The primary perspective that we will be using for PHP development is the PHP perspective. Among the important views available to us are the Navigator view, which allows us to organize and see our file system, and the PHP Browser, which is a web browser built into Eclipse.

If we are not happy with the way things are laid out in Eclipse, we have several options that allow us to change this. In the Window menu, there are tools that allow us to customize menu items and change which views are used in a perspective.