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

We have now walked through the creation of a basic PHP application using Eclipse, PHPEclipse, and a few other related third-party tools. Our application is a PHP project named ShelterSite that we created in our workspace. We added a few common parts of a web application to the project — class files to hold business logic and database interfacing, view pages to display HTML, and a stylesheet to format our HTML page. In creating our class files, we saw how to use the PHP editor. We saw how code assist helps us in creating code, how the editor visually conveys potential coding problems to us, and how to customize templates. When we encountered a PHP function that we were not sure how to use, we used Eclipse’s help system to look up the function’s parameters and description.

Installing the Web Tools Platform gave us comprehensive HTML and CSS editors. This set of tools was designed specifically by the Eclipse Foundation to address the needs of web application developers...