Deploying your Site with PHPEclipse, continued - Ant Tools
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While Ant does not have its own perspective in Eclipse, it does have its own view and leverages the existing Outline view. Both are very helpful in developing Ant files for your projects.
The Ant view allows you to manage Ant build files in your workspace. It offers an overview of the build file and all its targets. You can add other build files to this view, execute them, and delete them via the icons in the toolbar.
When you are editing an Ant build file, the Outline view will give you structural information about your file. Organized by targets, the view gives you information on tasks and important parameters in the build file.
Summary
In the final step of our development, Eclipse also helps by providing tools to help with the deployment of our site. Using the FTP and WebDAV export plug-ins of the JDT, and the Klomp SFTP plug-in, we can directly push a site to a web server. In more controlled environments, we can automate this process by creating Ant build files. While writing Ant build files may involve more work initially, we save time in the long run because Ant can automate the tedious movement of deploying files, automatically grab the source files for us in CVS, and reduce human error in the process. Eclipse also helps us in creating Ant files with a built-in Ant editor and tools to execute and manage Ant build files. Initially built for Java, the use of Ant is just another example of the flexibility of Eclipse for all development, including for PHP-driven sites.
PHPEclipse: A User Guide
The PHP language has come a long way from its humble roots as a set of Perl scripts written by Rasmus Lerdorf. Today, PHP enjoys enormous market share and the latest release, PHP 5, sports a robust object-oriented programming model. Naturally, development practices have also matured. Those of us who taught ourselves PHP in the late nineties have become more sophisticated in our coding techniques. PHP has also made significant headway into corporate environments. Both changes have led to a demand for tools that make development easier, faster, and more integrated with other systems such as databases and version-control tools.
Our tool selections, however, have historically been one of two extremes. On one hand are the editors. Fundamentally, these are text editors with basic development tools slapped on. While affordable, they lacked features that made them a true integrated development environment (IDE). To get these features, we had to purchase powerful and expensive IDEs. Even then, our choices were limited to NuSphere's PhpED or Zend Studio.
Things began to change in 2001. IBM released Eclipse, a powerful Java IDE, as an open source project. Developers saw the potential of Eclipse's extensible, plug-in-based architecture. Thanks to this community, Eclipse soon became much more than an editor and spoke many more languages than just Java. In 2003, a team of developers released the PHPEclipse plug-in. Finally the gap between PHP and Eclipse was closed. Developers now have a free and powerful IDE for PHP development.
In this book, we will explore using Eclipse for PHP web development using the PHPEclipse plug-in. We will take a tutorial-style approach throughout most of this book. Installation and setup walkthroughs are provided. Features of Eclipse and PHPEclipse that are helpful for PHP development will be explained.
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 This article is excerpted from PHPEclipse: A User Guide, written by Shu-Wai Chow (Packt Publishing, 2006; ISBN: 1904811442). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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