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

A brief history of source code control


The Revision Control System (RCS) tool is a lightweight utility for versioning individual files. All revisions, access logs, permissions, and so forth are being kept in a single text file, which is really easy to create on the fly. I have used RCS to version server config files. That way, you can easily back out of any changes quickly in case you break the configuration and the service goes down completely. It also makes it easy to review and revert to previous configurations even if it is long after you have already forgotten the actual changes you made to the file.

You can visit the official RCS homepage as a starting point for learning more about this tool. There, you can also find download links to the current source code, binaries for various platforms, and the original paper that inspired the creation of RCS:

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/trinkle/RCS/

RCS comes with a cast of supporting utilities that turn its basic functionality into a functioning...