The PHP language has come a long way from its humble roots as a set of Perl scripts written by Rasmus Lerdorf. Today, PHP enjoys enormous market share and the latest release, PHP 5, sports a robust object-oriented programming model. Naturally, development practices have also matured. Those of us who taught ourselves PHP in the late nineties have become more sophisticated in our coding techniques. PHP has also made significant headway into corporate environments. Both changes have led to a demand for tools that make development easier, faster, and more integrated with other systems such as databases and version-control tools.
Our tool selections, however, have historically been one of two extremes. On one hand are the editors. Fundamentally, these are text editors with basic development tools slapped on. While affordable, they lacked features that made them a true integrated development environment (IDE). To get these features, we had to purchase powerful and expensive IDEs. Even then, our choices were limited to NuSphere’s PhpED or Zend Studio.
Things began to change in 2001. IBM released Eclipse, a powerful Java IDE, as an open source project. Developers saw the potential of Eclipse’s extensible, plug-in-based architecture. Thanks to this community, Eclipse soon became much more than an editor and spoke many more languages than just Java. In 2003, a team of developers released the PHPEclipse plug-in. Finally the gap between PHP and Eclipse was closed. Developers now have a free and powerful IDE for PHP development.
In this book, we will explore using Eclipse for PHP web development using the PHPEclipse plug‑in. We will take a tutorial-style approach throughout most of this book. Installation and setup walkthroughs are provided. Features of Eclipse and PHPEclipse that are helpful for PHP development will be explained.