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

Goals and requirements


Let's consider what our goals should be in deploying or upgrading an application. Put another way, how do we measure success? One might be tempted to say that how well the application performs is equivalent to how well the deployment went. However, that would be misleading. At this stage, we don't concern ourselves anymore with functional design, programming, or testing. We are operating on the assumption that we have a fully functional application that needs to be deployed. Whether it works as expected may or may not still be our problem, but it has nothing to do with the deployment itself.

How then, you may ask, will we determine whether the deployment went well? What shall we strive for in coming up with a deployment plan? As you may have guessed, I have a couple of ideas on the topic.

First, a deployment should happen quickly. If you have been deploying applications manually, you will be surprised as to how much of that activity can be automated if only it is planned...