PHP development environment

Akuate

Hi friends,

I am completely new to PHP but have extensive experience of the J2EE. We are planning to develop a commercial website in PHP and MySQL. We will be hosting it on Linux host. I want to know what kind of development environment should I set up. We are used to developing on Windows and then pushing the applications on Unix servers. Can I do something similar in PHP i.e. develop & test on Windows platform and push it onto Linux at regular intervals? Is PHP cross-platform i.e. if I develop and test code on Windows will it work on Linux?

Your help on this will be greatly apprecaiated.

Please also point me to any documents on this topic.

Thanks a lot.

Pig

Most of it will work the same. That is how I am set up. Develop on Win, and publish on FreeBSD. There are a differences, but the functions that differ will state if they do.

renaun

The main issues in PHP development environments are the version of PHP you are using. The settings of that PHP (the php.ini). And the modules/extensions and mode (cgi, isapi) PHP is installed as and with.

Web servers play a smaller role as long as the PHP versions are the same.

Most of my problem is with PHP version issue. I develop in the most current version and then have problems deploying it on older PHP versions. I would try and stick to PHP 4.3.x if you want to be the most secure and update on functionality. But then if you dont have control over the server you might run across 4.1.x or 4.2.x servers out there. You can always code around the older versions.

I also develop on Windows and deploy on Linux, sometimes develop on Linux too.

In developing Web Applications in general I have created a PHP Reusable Web Framework (rwfPHP) that is Event Driven framework. I am having great succes using rwfPHP to build web applications that require multiple developers.

But here is a link to recent POST about PHP frameworks.

http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=10268214&goto=newpost

Akuate

Thanks for replies friends.
Do you use any IDE for development on Windows?

Thanks a lot.

renaun

I have stayed on the free side so I have not tried Commercial ones more than a try version. Zend Studio is nice but not free, there are others.

The free one I use currently and seems work for my needs is Eclispe with the PHP plugin.

mmilano

i use Zend and Ultra-Edit .. Zend is great especially if you are not that familiar with the language as it has something like microsoft's intellisense feature in the ide.

when i need to make a quick edit, i open ultra edit though .. it saves about 7 seconds of starting up that bulky application.

Pig

Zend is the best, IMO, but it is so incredibly laggy that I don't use it at all. I use dreamweaver mx.

Akuate

Thanks for the all replies friends .
I had a few questions on the IDEs.
Does Eclipse IDE for PHP provide a runtime Apache environment also or do I have to install Apache on Windows and test the code I write in Eclipse by deploying it to Apache on Windows always?

Thanks a lot.

renaun

The Eclipse-PHP plugin does not provide Apache on windows. I personal just use IIS instead of installing apache on windows. But there are many good Windows-(IIS/Apache)-PHP installers.

Eclipse-PHP plugin does have a internal broswer that you can configure to point to your webserver. What I do is put my working directory of my code under the webserver's document root on my local machine. Then have set up Eclipse to run scripts in its internal browser that are located in that directory.

Eclipse has pretty good Java support too, if you are working with Java still.