The PDT project is working towards providing a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project will encompass all development components necessary to develop PHP and will facilitate extensibility. It will leverage the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities.

note: the following instructions are for running php 4.4.4 with apache 1.3.37 on win32 only. other packages combinations will have a different set of installation instructions.

- download the php 4.4.4 zip package from php.net

- extract to d:\ with subdirectories enabled; i extracted in d:\ and renamed the main subdirectory from d:\php-4.4.4-win32 to d:\php.

- read the install.txt file. the detailed instructions are there on how to install php in different operating environments and with different web servers.

- to make things easier, add the php subdirectory (d:\php) to the path environment variable so the system can easily find it. do this whether the cgi, the command line interface or the sapi module is going to be used.

- move the contents of the d:\php\dlls and d:\php\sapi subdirectories to the main php subdirectory d:\php.

- copy the php.ini-recommended file to where the apache binary is located and rename it to php.ini

- if you are using include files, add the full path name to the paths and directories section of php.ini.

- modify the apache configuration file (httpd.conf) to load the php4 module and recognize php pages when apache starts

at the end of the loadmodule section add:

LoadModule php4_module “d:/php/php4apache.dll”

at the the end of the addmodule section:

AddModule mod_php4.c

add the following line inside the first ifmodule mod_mime.c conditional brace (i found there were two)

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

modify the directoryindex entry to look like the following:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

do not forget to restart apache after applying the changes above.

and i’m going to create it using eclipse. the 3.2 final came out july 2006 and the platform should be stable. this’ll definitely (hopefully) force me to learn how to use the thing.

bad idea.

and me being an eclipse noob didn’t know exactly where to start as soon as i called up the workspace. i didn’t know which menu item belongs to which, what does what. rtfm. more of it. duh.

so i hosed the whole eclipse subdirectory and start reinstalling again. but this time i’ll install a plug-in and then evaluate, install plug-in and evaluate… well, you get the idea.

the one i tried out first is, of course, the web standard tools (wst). i can easily create a new page using the available templates but that’s about it. being a homesite user kind of made me a little spoiled and i expected that to put the strong tag would mean pressing ctrl+b or that clicking on the browser icon would call up a browser with my newly created page showing. nope. i think i still have to mess with some of the settings before i can get to where i’m comfortable with. but hey, this is a totally different program that has a totally different way of doing things compared to homesite so this is expected.

since i was hitting a couple of walls with wst i tried putting phpeclipse into the mix. it has its own perspective so that’s a nice touch. they also recommended installing xampp by apache friends to complete the development environment. xammp is a package that installs, among other things, apache webserver, mysql, a php and perl interpreter. i was able to try an earlier version of xampp so this wasn’t anything new. although being able to turn off/on the apache and mysql services with a couple of clicks is really a great improvement in ease of use.

currently, that’s where i am. more updates to come.

so, in an attempt to hold on to what i have i decided to help homesite spew out xhtml code by creating some shortcuts to replace some of the built-in tags. the only tag that gave me a bit of trouble is image (img) tag. i tried hacking into the img tag definition just to add the ‘ /’ (space + closing slash) at the end of the tag to make it compliant but it just doesn’t want to. that bit encouraged me look for another html editor. download.com had plenty of editors and a handful of good ones. i’ve actually tried a few popular ones but they didn’t give me that ‘ding!’ that i was looking for. i still have to evaluate a couple more though.

a css editor is a must with today’s web pages but the one that came with homesite — bradbury software’s topstyle lite does the job pretty well and it can be used independently so i’m not exactly looking for a replacement for that piece of software.

there is also the handful of javascripts that i mess with and, since i started using wordpress, i’ve been looking at and using some php code as well. once in a blue moon, have a bunch of perl scripts that i hack into. i’ve configured homesite to be the default editor for these files but it wasn’t exactly born to it. although it does have pretty syntax highlighting for those files.

i’m also trying to wade into xml and most of its sub-thingies (ok i forget all those acronyms) and i found out that my homesite cannot handle that. i also found out that xml editing software has a lot more features and is expensive. ugh. be still my aching wallet.

so after the door met with my forehead 8O, i got this gut feel that there should be a free editor out there that can handle this web stuff — xhtml, html, css, javacript and xml. it may even handle php and/or perl. so after a handful of searching and reading and some more searching and re-reading i slowly discovered that eclipse may be able to replace my html editor and then some.

ok. eclipse, they say, is a great java development environment. officially, “eclipse is an open (ide) platform for anything, and for nothing in particular.“ it supports java development out of the box, but it can be configured to support other development environments through plug-ins. if you want to know more, the eclipse guys put up a wiki with all the faqs. read if you’re up to it.

let’s get a few facts out of the way. i’m not a java developer. i have made a few very simple textbook-type java programs just to try to learn the language. i’ve also tried assembly programming for a while but i don’t get to be that crazy all the time . i spent more time with pascal and c using borland’s dos-based integrated development environment (ide) but that was when dos was still king. i liked borland’s ide because it was quick and easy to learn and they have a couple of companion books that were very helpful.

most of my coding are done in xhtml, html, css and the rest are in php, javascript and some learning lessons in perl and xml. that’s it. from the eclipse documentation i can probably bend eclipse to be used as a development tool for all those web stuff/languages. its should only be a matter of finding the right plug-ins.

the following items/posts will be about the steps i took/is taking to get eclipse up and working for my needs. they may or may not be correct steps so those of you who may know a better path then please leave your comments.

first thing i did was to download eclipse. the thing is huge! 116 megabytes (compared to homesite’s 14 meg). i got the 3.2 stream stable build instead of the 3.1.2 release version. the downloaded file is a zip archive so all i had to do was unzip the thing to my drive with the “use folder names” option. for my convenience, i created a shortcut of the eclipse executable on the desktop. double-click on the shortcut and eclipse is running. simple. it does default to a java development environment so i have to change that to what i need. a requirement for running eclipse is that i have to have a java runtime environment (jre) installed which i did.

it did occur to me that since my eclipse workspace and installation subdirectories are stored in separate drives, i can just delete the subdirectory where i installed eclipse and just reinstall again. no mucking with the registry or worrying if this or that got installed in the proper system directory.

the next “eclipse” post will be about the plug-ins i have tried.