XDebug and Eclipse PDT on Windows - From Start to Finish

May 20th, 2008 by Aaron

XDebug and Eclipse PDT on Windows - From Start to Finish

With our recent upgrade to php at “the triangle,” I felt it was time to start working on using a debugging and code profiling tool. When I say felt like it was time… I meant our PHP version finally supported it. *sigh*. Anyway, from start to finish, this is what I did in order to get Xdebug to integrate into my current eclipse PDT - as well as investigate the other features of xdebug. I tried to detail all of the mistakes I made as well as what I figured out. Let’s go:

Continue reading XDebug and Eclipse PDT on Windows - From Start to Finish

Eclipse Testing with TPTP - help me?

December 10th, 2007 by Aaron

I recently came across this tutorial here about Testing with TPTP- and I’m confused. Whats the benefit of this type of testing (um… creating JAVA code for a JUnit test… right?) compared to running some PHPUnit, Selenium and AB (from apache, or something…)? What am I missing - does anyone have any other good hands-on tutorials?

Use MySQL Gui tools to securely connect to remote database

October 27th, 2007 by Aaron

This particular example is going to be based on a connection from Windows XP using Putty, MySQL GUI tools and Dreamhost.

Quick summary of issue: I want to use MySQL Query Browser to access my database on my dreamhost account. The database allows connections from the webserver only - nothing external. I have an SSH account on the webserver.

Quick answer: This requires us to tunnel from our machine to the webserver and connect through this tunnel to the database server.

Lets take a look on how we can accomplish this:

Continue reading Use MySQL Gui tools to securely connect to remote database

Tools of the trade

August 31st, 2007 by Aaron

I just thought I’d drop some useful links and tools your way for those beginning and non-tool-cist peoples:

http://getfirebug.com/
used for js/css/dom debugging - additionally, even Yahoo is building upon this. I’ve used this a lot for AJAX request debugging as well.

http://zend.com/pdt
Zend eclipse project - get the full package - this is a ton of PHP tools from Zend (the PHP company) built on top of Eclipse (for those Java tool lovers out there)

Aptana
useful for css/javascript editing in eclipse - or as a standalone

Mysql Gui Tools
a nice gui browser for mysql - I know I know - us diehards - we shouldn’t need this - but it is still nice (you can also get plugins for eclipse to do the same thing with jdbc)

Pietty + Putty
Pietty - a putty plugin - allows for true transparency of putty windows - amazingly cool - at first its in some oriental language - and when you first open it up - you can’t read the screen when you first ssh somewhere. Never fear: just goto the encoding menu option and choose utf-8 - otherwise works like a dream. SSH to your heart’s content.

Komodo
If you don’t like Eclipse or the long time it takes to load, you can use Komodo. Plus, version 4 brings some lovely things to the table. Thats right, Lovely (and thats not cuz they gave me a shirt either…)

PHPDoc
Phpdoc for windows - has a nice gui for using phpdoc - what we use for documentation because its easy to customize and launch. (I have been using an eclipse tool though lately that I wrote….)

Thats about it - if you know any other cool tools, post them in the comments!

Master the ‘Run As’ option in Eclipse PDT with PHP

July 21st, 2007 by Aaron

Most of my development in Eclipse PDT with the results tested outside of it - using firefox. PDT has a few options in the Run… menu:

• PHP Script
• PHP Webpage
• Web Browser

So, lets take some time to look into how each one of these works, what are their configurations and what could be the benefit of using one above the other.

Continue reading Master the ‘Run As’ option in Eclipse PDT with PHP

Live Combined Error Reporting for Apache and PHP during Development

July 20th, 2007 by Aaron

So many times during development, I’ve missed little PHP errors because they were 1) on a processing page that was redirected or 2) output inside of a html tag - and rendered invisible. From time to time, I have to go back to my file system and check the php error log to see what happened. The first step to solving this was implimenting a custom error handler - which we did at (”the triangle”). But I’m torn on this: should the error handler script function the exact same during development as it does in production, or should we write two different error handlers. To keep the code as simple as possible and allow for scenario regeneration, I opted to have the error handler work the exact same way in development. Some might disagree, but thats not the point here. The issue was that I needed to watch the error log closer (I’m notoriously bad at not checking errors - see my previous post about error reporting…).

Another thing I knew would be nice to see would be the apache error log. As I’m not combining my error logs with php, I don’t often check the apache one. However, local mistakes can cause errors on the production server too.

Luckily, I was able to find a utility that made life easier - and of course - integrates into eclipse. Lets configure:

Continue reading Live Combined Error Reporting for Apache and PHP during Development

Two New useful external tools for Eclipse

July 19th, 2007 by Aaron

In my posting about Integrating PHPDocumentor into Eclipse, I touched on External Tools a bit. The combination of external batch files, the external tools extra options and the console has made my life easier. I’m using two new additional batch files that I’ve written myself and integrated as external tools. These include automated SVN release update and resource refresh and Apache application control (for those who can’t run apache as a service on w32):

Continue reading Two New useful external tools for Eclipse

Eclipse Integration with Tortoise SVN

July 14th, 2007 by Aaron

I generally don’t like to be tied to a specific IDE when developing. Additionally, I like to have my choice in using tools to manage my source control (tortoisesvn, svn command line, etc). I just think this is the open-source way - it seems to be just a more free-spirited way of developing and managing projects. With this in mind, I’ve been looking for ways to integrate my SVN into my current IDE (Eclipse PDT) but not limit myself from accessing my SVN repositories from the file system. I’ve found a great plugin to help with this - so lets go over the specifics:

Continue reading Eclipse Integration with Tortoise SVN

Tamper Data Firefox Extension - is it worth it?

July 4th, 2007 by Aaron

As you can probably tell from my last test of a firefox extension here, I am constantly looking for new tools to make my job more accurate (see: lazier). Another similar extension I came across is Tamper Data. Tamper Data doesn’t have alot of documentation, so it was harder to actually determine the uses of this extension. Some tutorials on the net claimed that Tamper Data was better than Live Headers or Load Time Analyzer. So, I decided to try it out. Lets see some screenshots and some features:

Continue reading Tamper Data Firefox Extension - is it worth it?

Load Time Analyzer for Firefox

June 24th, 2007 by Aaron

So, I started looking at a few load time analyzers for my sites - and I found an interesting plugin for firefox. I wasn’t too entirely sure what I was going to find - but I figured I’d try it out and figure out if it was useful.

My test site will be JEMDiary - mainly because I know ALOT about it. I could have used a local website, I’m sure - but a remote site was going to give a better load time analysis. JEMDiary’s homepage is a static HTML file (generated periodically behind the scenes). It loads a few external js and css files, and a set of images as well. The images in the images directory send headers to cache themselves, and so do the css and js files (interestingly, if the front page had specific profile images, they would not be cached…) At any rate, I wanted to test a fresh load on the site, and then a cached one - and see what I can determine from these load times.

Lets go…

Continue reading Load Time Analyzer for Firefox