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

The debugger is an important and valuable toolset of PHPEclipse and any IDE. Using it, we can pause and continue the execution of our program at any line. While it’s stopped, we can examine variables to verify that they’re holding the right values and change them to do further testing. Without an IDE, we’d have to check variables by echoing them out onto the web page. This causes us to alter our application with code that does not have anything to do with the required functionality.

Currently, the PHPEclipse debugger lacks a few features that the Eclipse debugger for Java has. For example, PHPEclipse is missing:

  • Conditional breakpoints: The ability to stop the debugger when a certain condition is met. For example, stopping the debugger when a variable changes values.
  • Breakpoint hit counts: The ability to stop the debugger when a breakpoint has been reached a certain number of times. This is very helpful for loops.

However, debugging is one of the most active development...