Hi There has been some discussion over the last couple of months about development tools, IDEs etc. I have been spurred on by these conversations to improve my development environment. I thought I would share the details of my setup (which I am pretty happy with now) in the hope that it may be useful to others.
IDE: Eclipse PHP Source control: Perforce Build tool: Ant Bug tracking: Mantis This lot may be overkill for some, but I have found that it is a great set of tools that are saving me time and hassles already. Eclipse PHP: I probably can't say much about Eclipse that hasn't been said before, other than: its worth persisting and reading the documentation to get your head around it. It took me about a day to become comfortable with it, and I am now gaining confidence. The best thing for me about Eclipse is the very good integration with Ant and Perforce. This has saved me time and given my code greater security. Perforce: I dare say that Perforce is not so popular a choice since it is not open source, but I have a small business and can live with the free two seat version. Source code control is just a given for me now and has added a level of professionalism to my work that I really need. I am sure that CVS would offer the same sort of benefits. It is also well supported by Eclipse. Ant: Learning to use Ant has resulted the biggest improvement in my coding practices (and reduction in development time). For each project I now have at least three targets for the build: - Development server for testing as I work - Staging server for showing new functionality to the client - Production server for release of the site I use the Ant build to do things like set the database connection details, and other configuration strings for the different servers. This alone reduces errors, and speeds up the process enormously. I also love the way Ant builds can be used to change directory structures. I have an ideal structure in Perforce, but it is different on the dev and staging servers, and again on the production server with my ISP. Finally, the FTP ability of Ant on top of all of the above is the icing on the cake. One click and the released site sails up to the production server with all of the settings required by the ISP made. I have not yet looked at dumping and transferring databases, but that comes next ... If you are using Eclipse, then you have Ant built in already. I would strongly recommend having a look at it. Mantis: The last link in the chain for me is Mantis. It is great to have a formalised bug tracking system that my clients, and development team can use to collaborate on testing development. It's easy to set up, easy to use, and keeps everything in one place and available to everyone involved. I have even created a Cake controller and view that can be used to give feedback from within a Cake based site, that then gets logged in the Mantis bug tracker as an anonymous user. If available it also captures the user name from the session, and the screen where the report is being made from. So that's it. I hope that this may have been useful to some Cake bakers. Regards, Langdon --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
