PHPEclipse: A User Guide: Take advantage of the leading open source integrated development environment to develop, organize, and debug your PHP web development projects. (Paperback)

~ Shu-Wai Chow (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Take advantage of the leading open source integrated development environment to develop, organize, and debug your PHP web development projects.

• Compact guide to using Eclipse and PHPEclipse for web development
• Slash development time by improving the efficiency of your PHP coding and organizing your projects in the PHPEclipse environment
• Learn to use Eclipse for debugging PHP applications, interfacing with databases, and managing source code
• No previous knowledge of Eclipse required

In Detail

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.

What you will learn from this book?

• Finding your way around the Eclipse environment
• Working with the PHP editing features of PHPEclipse to correct your PHP syntax
• Configuring and using the debugger to help troubleshoot PHP code
• Using PHPDocumentor to quickly create documentation for your code
• Interfacing to SQL databases using the QuantumDB plug-in
• Managing your source code repository from within Eclipse
• Deploying your application to production servers via FTP, SFTP, WebDav
• Using Ant to deploy your PHP applications

Approach

Written in a concise and friendly style, packed with tips and a practical project, this book will instruct you on using PHPEclipse to make your PHP application development more efficient, and cut development time.

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for PHP developers who want an open source development environment for creating web applications. You do not need any knowledge of Java or prior experience of Eclipse to use this book.

About the Author

Shu-Wai Chow

Shu-Wai Chow has worked in computer programming and information technology for the past eight years. He started his career in Sacramento, California, spending four years as the webmaster for Educaid, a First Union Company, and another four years at Vision Service Plan as an application developer. Through the years, he has become proficient in Java, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion, ASP, LDAP, XSLT, and XSL-FO. Shu has also been the volunteer webmaster and a feline adoption counselor for several animal welfare organizations in Sacramento.

He is currently a software engineer at Antenna Software in Jersey City, New Jersey, and is finishing his studies in Economics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Born in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, Shu did most of his alleged growing up in Palo Alto, California. He lives on the Jersey Shore with seven very demanding cats, four birds that are too smart for their own good, a tail-less bearded dragon, a betta who needs her tank cleaned, a dermestid beetle colony, a cherished Fender Stratocaster, and a beloved, saint-like fiancé.

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (February 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811442
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811442
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #603,613 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Instructions on How to Install and Use PHPEclipse, June 21, 2006

By	Diane Cipollo (Editor at BellaOnline.com) - See all my reviews

When you are first learning a new computer language such as PHP, you will want to complete each line of code and each phase of the program by hand and without using any shortcuts. This is the best way to learn. But as we all know, in the real world, we are all pressed for time. Many programmers turn to an IDE (integrated development environment) to keep them organized and to streamline the workflow. This book by Shu-Wai Chow will show you how to install, setup and use PHPEclipse which is a popular open source IDE for PHP programmers.

The author begins with an introduction to IDE's covering their main features and the pros and cons of using them. Following this, is an introduction to PHPEclipse, its history and architecture. Then the fun begins. Chow's tutorial-styled narrative walks you through each step as you install the main software; Apache, PHP, Java, Eclipse and PHPEclipse. I especially liked that he used the free, open source distribution/installation software called XAMPP which automates the installation of Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. He covers the installation for Windows, Mac and Linux. At this point you also install Java and PHPEclipse. Finally, he thoroughly discusses the user interface, the views (palettes) and dialog boxes and how you might want to customize these.

Once you have these installed, you begin to work on a real PHP application project which is a database driven website for an animal shelter. You learn how to set up this project's files and folders within PHPEclipse. Then you begin building the PHP code and supporting HTML, JavaScript and CSS files for the website. You also begin to work on the database, program objects and classes. Chow introduces some helpful tools at this point including WTP (Web Tools Platform project), HTML Tidy, Eclipse Tidy and phpDocumentor. I especially liked the phpDocumentor feature that builds the documentation for your application from your source code comments.

Debugging is the next topic and after an introduction to terms and concepts, Chow shows how to install and setup the DBG debugger. With this feature, you can use more sophisticated debugging practices than the basic echo ( ) function we all know so well. Chow walks you through a complete debugging session and discusses common strategies.

The next step is to turn PHPEclipse into a database client by the addition of the Quantum DB plug-in. Chow demonstrates how to use this with a relational database and how to perform common tasks such as writing SQL statements and manipulating tables.

Depending on your projects, you may or may not feel that you need the help of version control software to keep track of the changes made to your application. However, you will be surprised at how helpful this software is with even the simplest project. Chow helps you install, setup and use the CVS version control software with PHPEclipse and also discusses some common terms and concepts along the way. Lastly, Chow covers how to setup PHPEclipse to work with FTP, Secure FTP, WebDAV and Ant for publishing your new site.

As you can see, this book is more than just instructions on how to install these programs. It also gives you hands-on practice using them. You can download the complete application and sample files from the supporting website. Shu-Wai Chow has been working in the programming field for over eight years and is proficient in Java, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion, ASP, LDAP, XSLT and XSL-FO.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable, February 17, 2006

By	D. E. Hansen "just a coder" (Aptos, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I don't know how I ever wrote php code without Eclipse! And this book makes it easy and FUN to use Eclipse. Shu Chow is a master at explaining the concepts involved as well as the functionality of the tool.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for newbies, June 9, 2008

By	Adam Barrett (SL, UT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

PHPEclipse: A User Guide is a quick read. Having already worked with Eclipse for PHP development the book didn't present any drastic or life changing additions to my technique with Eclipse.

The book is greatly geared toward the newest of PHP programmers, ones still looking to make a mark in the world, or those who are looking to escape the claws of another IDE and want to know what Eclipse and PHPEclipse are all about. Shu-Wai does and excellent job of explaining what Perspectives and Views are and how they work together to make up the meat of PHPEclipse.

Each chapter is full of quick information about how to setup a specific aspect of Eclipse to better work with PHP development. Chapters 3 and 4 explain how the IDE displays information about your application to you, and where to look for more information. Chapters 5 through 8 explain different plug-ins (CVS, Debug, Deploying code) and explain how they work integrated with Eclipse. The best part of each of these latter chapters is they explain in detail how to get the particular plugin installed and configured. It was a fresh and welcome look at plugins and how they work.

What peaked my interest in the book were two things. The first was Appendix A which explains more about where to get more plugins and information about the plugins. The second was the overview of Eclipse. A short history and explanation of how Eclipse came to be what it is today. I was particularly interested in the plugin development, which is built right into Eclipse.

Although the book is short, and a quick read, if you are thinking about picking up Eclipse and using it, you should get this book and read through it while you are in the process.