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 the Debugger

Before we can even start to configure Eclipse, we need to prepare our environment. We will need to install and configure DBG to listen to our PHP engine.

First, we need to install DBG. There are precompiled binaries for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. The source code is also available for you to download and compile yourself. We may need to do this to install DBG for Mac OS X or if we need to install for a version of PHP that is not officially supported by the binaries.

The second part of this is to configure Eclipse to act as the DBG client. We will set global preferences and application-specific settings.

Before we start, we need a bit of a warning. Installing and configuring the PHPEclipse debugger is not an easy task. We are configuring PHP, Apache, DBG, and PHPEclipse to work together as a unit. It gets even more complicated when we consider container packages for these products like Eclipse, XAMPP, and Marc Liyanage’s PHP package. You will need to be meticulous...