Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By : Dirk Merkel
Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By: Dirk Merkel

Overview of this book

Even if you find writing PHP code easy, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is not so straightforward. Self-taught PHP developers and programmers transitioning from other languages often lack the knowledge to work with PHP on an enterprise level. They need to take their PHP development skills to that level by learning the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code.This book will enable you to take your PHP development skills to an enterprise level by teaching you the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code. You will learn how to perform activities such as unit testing, enforcing coding standards, automating deployment, and interactive debugging using tools created for PHP developers – all the information in one place. Your code will be more maintainable, efficient, and self-documented.From the design phase to actually deploying the application, you will learn concepts and apply them using the best-of-breed tools available in PHP.Experienced developers looking for expertise in PHP development will learn how to follow best practices within the world of PHP. The book contains many well-documented code samples and recipes that can be used as a starting point for producing quality code.Specifically, you will learn to design an application with UML, code it in Eclipse with PDT, document it with phpDocumentor, debug it interactively with Xdebug, test it by writing PHPUnit tests, manage source code in Subversion, speed up development and increase stability by using Zend Framework, pull everything together using continuous integration, and deploy the application automatically with Phing – all in one book. The author's experience in PHP development enables him to share insights on using enterprise tools, in a clear and friendly way.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Expert PHP 5 Tools
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Environment setup considerations


In all chapters thus far, we have focused on a single tool to get the job done. Although I tried to select the most established and mature PHP-centric tools, at times it simply came down to preference or perspective. The case in this chapter is even more complicated than that.

Do I need a dedicated CI server?

Continuous integration can be done on any machine, including a developer's workstation. If you can spare the resources in terms of memory, disk space, and CPU cycles, you can make the CI process the responsibility of an existing machine, perhaps a file server or even your version control system. Another factor in making this decision is the size of the team. If you are the primary observer of the CI output, it might be convenient to have the automated builds performed on your machine. However, if your team size were slightly larger, it would be important to have the CI server centrally accessible. Carrying it around on your laptop might benefit yourself...