| 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. |
