37: Watching the PHPEclipse before Christmas
2008-12-21
Download MP3 For Geekons Episode 37
Pop-Up: PHPEclipse
- Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle.
- A simple way to look at it, is Eclipse is a community that makes the Eclipse IDE, which is a very nice Java IDE to make writing Java apps easier and more robust.
- The Eclipse community kept things extensible though, and included a plugin and update system that makes it easy to use the super-hard work of the Eclipse community to write PHP apps. (That's where the PHPEclipse community comes in)
- The PHPEclipse community wrote a slick system that creates a new perspective (PHP) in Eclipse and has all kinds of cool features:
- Syntax Coloring
- Brackets Matching
- Code folding
- Code Completion
- Parameter hints
- Mark Occurrences
- Hover Tool tips
- PHP Manual integration
- Code templates
- Debuggers
- Version Control via CVS
- Plus it has all the default features of the Eclipse IDE, including a totally customizable interface.
- I have spent hundreds of dollars on the non-open source standard for PHP development (Zend Studio) and I love it, but the latest version of Zend Studio is a super-tweaked version of Eclipse. (In fact, it is called Zend Studio for Eclipse)
- So, if you are just getting started with PHP, but want to do large projects, I strongly recommend starting with PHPEclipse, and then purchasing Zend Studio for Eclipse if PHPEclipse ever falls short.
- 5 out of 5 stars, This is pretty much THE development environment for PHP and it is FREE and Open Source! Can't get much better than that!
Geek-Tweak: Setting up your first project in PHPEclipse
- Install Eclipse from http://www.eclipse.org/
- Download and install the latest Java Runtime Environment from Sun at http://java.com/getjava
- Download the version of Eclipse Classic for your operating system (unless you are a Java nut, then you may want to get Eclipse IDE for *Java EE Developers or some other Java-centric flavor of Eclipse)
- After you've downloaded the compressed folder for your system, extract it with your favorite compression utility (if you are on Windows, I think it is faster to download 7-zip and use that than to extract it with the built in Windows compression utility)
- Now launch the core Eclipse program.
- Run Eclipse (Just launch the Eclipse file in the core eclipse folder you just extracted)
- Add the PHP Eclipse update site
- Go to Help>Software Updates and click on the "Available Software" tab
- Click "Add Site" and paste in the PHP Eclipse update site for your version of Eclipse
- Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4 use http://update.phpeclipse.net/update/stable/1.2.x
- Eclipse 3.2 use http://update.phpeclipse.net/update/stable/1.1.x
- Click "OK" and you will notice Eclipse starts scanning the update site and finding what software updates are available.
- On my system, I see phpeclipse.sourceforge.net and update.phpeclipse.net so I'm going to use phpeclipse.sourceforge.net and check the "Stable Release Builds" box
- Just to double check, expand the folder to make sure PHPEclipse is one of those stable release builds.
- Click "Install" and it will pop up a box to show you the new software to be installed. As long as you see PHPEclipse in there, click "next", accept the terms (if you agree to them) and click "Finish"
- Eclipse will now download and install the new PHPEclipse software!
- Open the PHP Eclipse environment
- After you install PHPEclipse, restart Eclipse
- When Eclipse opens again, click Window>Open Perspective>Other
- Choose PHP from that menu, and click OK
- Start a new PHP project
- Click File>New>PHP Project
- Type in a name for your project, like "helloworld" and click "finish"
- Create your first PHP page in PHPEclipse by right-clicking on the helloworld folder in the navigator (on the left of the default PHP Perspective) and choose New>PHP File
- In the new file dialog box, make sure /helloworld is the container, and type in hello.php as the file name then click OK
- Add a new line before the closing PHP tag "?>" and type "ec"
- Now press control and space, and watch it finish the echo statement, and get you ready to type in some text!
- Type "Hello World!" instead of "string" and save the file.
- Upload the file to your web server and test it out!
- Make some super-awesome PHP applications and release them open source
View-Source: Being Demoted to a User
- My pastor gave a great sermon this morning on "Christmas in a Nutshell", which summed up Christmas in one verse: John 1:14 (The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.)
- Christmas is just a holiday we made up to celebrate the fact that the Word became flesh.
- It is funny how I can remember celebrating Christmas as a young child, but it wasn't until my teenage years that I understood what it meant that the Word became flesh.
- I understood that Jesus was God's son, and he died for me, but I didn't really understand what all was involved for the Word to become flesh.
- Thankfully, we've got another geeky Christmas story to clear things up!
- The Network Admin had created the ideal network, it was perfect!
- Unfortunately, after all of the wires were run, protocols established, and routers were configured, the network seemed pretty pointless... just sitting there handing off ARP packets to pass the time.
- So the Network Admin decided to allow users on the network, and connected their computers to the domain.
- Pretty soon, weatherbug was installed on half the systems, nobody had an authorized screen saver, and now all those ARP packets were guiding along streaming video of cats singing and dancing on youtube!
- Many emails were sent from the Network Admin to the supervisors who then relayed the network policies to the staff.
- Myspace pages were still created and updated on a regular basis, and the Net Admin even noticed a few old network printers listed on eBay by the staff!!
- Staff considered the Network Admin to be out-of-it and disconnected.
- The Network Admin also had strict policies not allowing the staff to access the servers directly (and thus corrupting them), but something had to be done!
- Finally, the Network Admin realized he would need to become a user!
- He swiped his badge and walked out of the command center, configuring the lock to not allow him back in until his work was completed.
- Of course he still had VPN, SSH, and VNC available to keep things running, but he wouldn't be misusing them while he had his green "user" badge.
- He logged into the network as a regular user, replaced toner, unjammed printers, and spent his lunches giving simple training tips that were easily understood to all of the staff that would listen.
- Despite all of his efforts, when it was known he was the Network Admin the people revolted, took away his green badge, and continued to berate him until he was forced to use the brushed aluminum badge to gain entry to the Command Center again, where he continued to monitor the network and communicate with the staff directly.
- So, while it may seem like a trivial thing, the Word becoming flesh, just think of how horrible it would be to go from domain admin to local user status, and that doesn't even compare in the least to what Christ did.
- This Christmas I hope that we are all reminded of the sacrifice Christ made just coming to Earth in the flesh, and gain a renewed desire to have a better relationship with Him, and to agree with Him on how we should live our lives.
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