Preferences in Development Environments - Survey

[mark]

What development environment do you prefer to use for PKP development?

Tools for debugging?
HTML Validation?
What do you write your code with? BBEdit? Emacs? A hex editor ;
Tools for Javascript?
Measuring performance?
Database? PhpMyAdmin

[mcrider]

Hi Mark,

I'll bite:
Tools for debugging? Just the PHP interpreter (and PHP's built-in debug functions like debug_print_backtrace()), and firebug for some things (esp. CSS and DOM layout issues).
HTML Validation? W3C's web-based validator is good enough for me.
What do you write your code with? BBEdit 9 (the latest version, which rocks)
Tools for Javascript? Firebug
Measuring performance? Firebug (can you tell that I think Firebug is awesome?)
Database? PhpMyAdmin Both MySQL and PostgreSQL, and phpMyAdmin/phpPgAdmin

Cheers,
Matt

[mj]

Hi all, likewise:

Tools for debugging? I tend to use PHP's debug functions as well; usually O use error_log and tail -f the apache error log (with PHP error_reporting ALL).
HTML Validation? TextMate on OSX (a great alternative/competitor to BBEdit).
What do you write your code with? BBEdit? Emacs? PHPEclipse, for its great CVS integration, code history, and class outline tools. Fantastic IDE.
Tools for Javascript? Firebug and the Firefox Web Developer add-in.
Measuring performance? Usually I do tracing right in PHP (error_log and microtime).
Database? PhpMyAdmin? CocoaMySQL on OSX, although occasionally phpMyAdmin.

MJ

[jalperin]

Might as well throw in my tools...

Tools for debugging? I tend to use PHP's debug functions as well; but I set up script that combines Growl with tail -f. So I don't have to go to a terminal to see the output, error messages pop up on the screen as Growl Notification. If you're a Growl/OSX user and would like these few lines of code, let me know.
HTML Validation? Firefox has a nice validator Add-on that works well
What do you write your code with? BBEdit? Emacs? I second the use of PHPEclipse. The best best part is being able to go to a function/class definition at the touch of a button. I also use TextMate for editing XML files and in a few spots where Eclipse fails me.
Measuring performance? Mostly Firebug.
Database? PhpMyAdmin? CocoaMySQL. I always hated phpMyAdmin, but so many times we have no other choice...

[mcrider]

Hi all,

Juan, could you post that script or email it to me? I never thought about doing that.

As for PHPEclipse, I think I might have to give it another try--I used to use Eclipse religiously when I was writing Java, but not being able to debug like I used to when doing web development kindof turned me off of using such a big bloated app. But I do so miss the class outlining.....

Cheers,
Matt

[mj]

Juan: If you could post your script here with some install instructions, I'd love to take another stab at the latest version you're using. Having my background constantly filled with apache logs does get distracting at times.

Matt: Definitely give PHPEclipse (the pre-bundled OSX version) another look. I used to be against Eclipse's bloat as well, but much of that seems to be from all the Java stuff that comes with the "official" version. With just the minimal PHP/CVS stuff installed, it's fast enough on my 2GHz/2GB Macbook. There is apparently a PHP profiler that will let you set breakpoints and do state inspection and stuff, but I've never looked into getting it set up...

MJ

[jalperin]

You have to install growlnotify (its one of the Growl Extras). Then I set this up in a file called tail2grow.sh. Whenever I'm about to start programming, I open up a terminal window and type tailf2growl.sh /var/log/apache2/error_log &. You can set it to run all the time also, of course.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
   echo "Missing filename"
    exit 1
fi

tail -n0 -F $1 | while read; do
   echo $REPLY | cut -d' ' -f6,9- | growlnotify -a tailfgrowl -t $1;
done


Beware that sometimes you'll put a error_log in a location that gets hit 50 times and... well... you'll get about 50 notifications popping up on your screen. If you end up playing around a bit with cut and/or awk to clean up the output a little bit, pass that along to me. I've been meaning to do that for a while, but I hate playing around with those commands.

Eclipse is great, although a little sluggish. You have to install PHPEclipse plugin to get proper syntax highlighting, etc. I actually wish I could just learn to use TextMate to do all the things that are easily accessible in Eclipse. TextMate (and probably also BBEdit) are far superior text editors, but getting all the definition lookup, patch making, and CVS integration requires some setup and well, I simply can't be bothered.