Eclipse | Just Search Labs

Jan 02 2009

PHP Development Tools v2.0

It has been a long time coming, but it is finally here: the PHP Development Tools for Eclipse (PDT) have reached v2.0! We mentioned a few weeks ago that the project was going into release candidate overdrive in the run-up to its proposed release on Dec 29th, well, it well and truly did that. It even made its predicted release date! That has to be an achievement in open source development!

So, what can you look forward to now? Well, a whole raft of new snazzy features, split between various parts of the system which makes up PDT (such as the Web development tools and dynamic languages core behind it all). As it now runs in Eclipse 3.4, you can utilise the brilliant new JavaScript editor, a much improved code assist feature and support for all the new little bits and pieces which are lurking around for the current Eclipse base.

It remains to be seen what the big killer features will be for this new version, but from what I have experienced of it so far, it seems a much more stable and solid base from which PDT can blossom for the future. This all means better features, more often – which is never a bad thing!

You can grab the all-in-one package here, so hop to it!

Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development

Tags: eclipse, ide, pdt, PHP
Posted in Development, Open Source, PHP, Programming, Tools | No Comments »

Dec 12 2008

Eclipse PDT 2.0 incoming

It looks like the next major release of one of the best PHP development tools around, PDT for the Eclipse platform, is due out soon. Version 2.0 had initially been expected on September 15th earlier this year, but due to a shift in the specification and roadmap for the project they ended up delaying the proposed release date to December 29th.

This date seems to be realistic, as the first of 3 proposed release candidates was released on December 9th on the PDT site. This is good news, as it is intended to provide a bunch of new features for us PHP developers out there, along with better integration with existing Eclipse frameworks and foundations such as the WTP and DLTK modules.

Among the proposed features are such things as support for PHP 5.3 (namespaces and so on) and Eclipse 3.4. This shift to the latest Eclipse base will please many people as it will allow them to utilise the latest versions of productivity tools and other development IDEs which only work in v3.4 (PDT 1.03 only works on Eclipse 3.3 from my experience, I haven’t tested PDT 1.05 which was released recently and says it works with Eclipse 3.4 – maybe this is a stop-gap solution).

The full plan is available here for those of you who are interested, but the main points of improvement are:

Mark occurances – a handy editor feature for refactoring and debugging
Improvements to the modelling of your PHP projects in the system (PHP Model Infrastructure, whatever that is, Type Hierarchy View and an improved PHP Explorer)
Code templates
Code assistance with dynamic variables and types along with overridden methods

As you can see, none of the features are going to change your life overnight, but they may well make an already great tool even better, tighter and more in-depth than before – which can’t be bad.

If you want to check out the release candidates (RC1 is out at the time of writing) then go over to the PDT download page and grab it there. You will need Eclipse 3.4 with a few other modules first though!

Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development

Tags: eclipse, pdt, PHP, release
Posted in Development, Open Source, PHP, Programming, Tools | 12 Comments »

Nov 21 2008

Web Development Essentials – Tools (Part 2) – Eclipse

When starting out in development, most people end up hopping from one editor or IDE to another, always finding one which serves their purposes that little bit better or has that killer feature you can’t live without. Typically this ends up in increased development times as you reconfigure your software setup, migrate your project(s) across and do all the other little things which get you up to speed with your new choice.

It doesn’t always have to be this way though! There are people out there who are happy coding their PHP, Ruby or Python in a text editor, and that is all well and good. The one thing these don’t usually have though, is the ease of integrating with a variety of other elements of the toolchain. This is where Eclipse comes in.

Eclipse is not really an IDE, its a cross-platform… platform. Essentially, you can run a variety of IDEs within one all-encompassing framework, everything from a Java IDE (the default option) to a Python IDE with lots in-between. The best thing about this is that all of these can run peacefully side-by-side in the same running version of Eclipse in your machine – that means, like me, you could be hopping from the Web Site Tools IDE to the PHP Development Tools IDE in a flash, before dropping into any of the numerous addon apps which also integrate with the IDE easily!

For instance, I myself use a few on a regular basis – the RegEx Util, which is a nice little applet for testing your regular expressions, the Subversive SVN client for accessing and utilising source control and the Data Tools Platform for managing databases from a variety of vendors.

This is just the start though. Not only do free tools exist to help you get the job done, more and more commercial IDE products are turning to Eclipse as their platform of choice. Adobe’s Flex Builder can run in its own stand-alone version of Eclipse or a pre-existing installation, while Zend Studio, Aptana, Borland JBuilder and a whole raft of IBM software also run inside Eclipse. This proves its long-term credentials, and you will find yourself smiling when you can hop between developing your Flex-based applet and the site you intend to integrate it with with a single click of the mouse.