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

In the final step of our development, Eclipse also helps by providing tools to help with the deployment of our site. Using the FTP and WebDAV export plug-ins of the JDT, and the Klomp SFTP plug-in, we can directly push a site to a web server. In more controlled environments, we can automate this process by creating Ant build files. While writing Ant build files may involve more work initially, we save time in the long run because Ant can automate the tedious movement of deploying files, automatically grab the source files for us in CVS, and reduce human error in the process. Eclipse also helps us in creating Ant files with a built-in Ant editor and tools to execute and manage Ant build files. Initially built for Java, the use of Ant is just another example of the flexibility of Eclipse for all development, including for PHP-driven sites.