Essential tools for PHP web developers

Essential tools for PHP web developers

I hope you enjoyed the book list, here are some of my recommendations for software to use when you develop your applications.

Editing Software
I use an excellent named PHPED IDE from NuSphere. It is very well priced and it has some brilliant features including intellisense and will pick up all classes, objects, methods, properties, variables and functions that are available to the page you work on. It also has support for CSS, Javascript, Perl and Smarty Templates. The installation also comes with a debug software and a few other tricks and whistles. I see it as an essential tool for anyone coding PHP on a PC. Find out more at nusphere.com

Primarlily I am a PC user, whether it be Linux or Windows, I like using PCs and my reasons go beyond this article. However I am not averse to new ideas or opinions and I have heard from many people that there is an editor called BBEdit by barebones sofware for OSX, unfortunately I have never tried it and cannot comment, but if you have the means, then please do so.

Browsers

I have chosen Firefox as an essential tool for a number of reasons. It has great support for CSS, is secure and is updated on a very regular basis. However, these are not the only reasons for me choosing this program. The other reason is that is has support for add-ons (little additions written by 3rd part developers) which I now consider to be essential.

Here are my list Firefox add-ons that I use:

• Firebug - great for looking at problems and properties of the DOM or Javascript. Has an excellent JavaScript console which is brilliant for debugging scripts. Has so many different options that it would be pointless to go through them here. Find out more here
• Web Developer - Adds new menus so that you can view CSS properties, JavaScript, Image Info... Again too much to list, so please go here for more info.
• Live HTTP headers - Allows you to view header information as it happens. Great tool for looking at information sent by the server. Find out more here
  

Internet Explorer - The other browser I must add here is IE. It is not the best browser in the world, but the market place deems it to be essential as it is still the dominant browser on the market. Your client based scripts, HTML and apps could many great things but if they do not work in IE then they are not going to gain popularity. In fairness to Microsoft they have done their best to iron out many of the CSS problems that has caused issues in the past. I tend to develop my apps using FF as the main browser. Once I'm happy with a page or the area I have been working, I always give it a test in IE to make sure it all renders properly.

• If you really do not want to use Internet Explorer, then there is an option for those with a love of Firefox. You can actually download an addon that will simulate IE within FF. To find out more, please go here.

The obvious choices:

You of course must have an installed PHP installed on your system. With most Linux distributions, the packages can be added at installation or later. You will also need MySQL installed as well, again if you do know how to do this or do not feel comfortable adding to a Linux system it can be tricky. In terms of the Operating System, PHP is a very versatile piece of software and can be installed to be used with either Apache in Linux or on Windows or it can be even installed on IIS in Windows. It is your choice to make and should be made according to your ability at using these Operating Systems.

Unfortunately for people who want to use PHP or MySQL in a Linux installation is beyond the scope of this article. However for those who want to use Windows, there is a simple alternative called WAMP and that can be downloaded here. It installs and configures all the things you need and can get you up and running very quickly. The components that can be installed on Windows include Apache Web Server, MySQL and PHP (WAMP) and once added, you do have a fully working web server.

Reference Manuals/Books

• PHP.net - the PHP Manual - complete reference to everything in the PHP Language
• W3 schools - Excellent reference for HTML and JavaScript properties/methods
• JavaScript Bible - great JavaScript reference book
  
• PHP OOP solutions - still a great book (chapter 2 especially) to refer to

Hope these recommendations help and happy coding...

Dreamweaver - an excellent way to start your web development career

My love/hate relationship with Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver

I have since moved on from Dreamweaver but for some jobs it is still a very useful tool. A lot of pro developers hate Dreamweaver and in many cases they have a point. However like many things in life, when people get an idea or an opinion it can be very hard to change. I feel like I am an open minded person that believes in using the right tool for the right job.

Dreamweaver is an excellent program created by a great time of programmers and designers. It has a fantastic interface and it makes site creation available to the masses. When I first started using DW I thought the program was amazing and I was very impressed with how well it created dynamic pages with such a minimum of effort. Also it gives a person a very good look at how server pages work along with some basic interaction with databases and really does ease them in to the whole server side world of the web. It has been created to use many different models including ASP[.net] with MS SQL Server or Access; PHP with MySQL on different servers including IIS and Apache and is therefore a very adaptable piece of software.

Dreamweaver also allowed you to use the WYSIWYG side that allowed you to combine the design and the server side parts all on one page. This was indispensible for a person who had some HTML experience but hardly any server coding experience.

OK, on to the bad points. For people who can code their own apps in a server side language this piece of software will no doubt infuriate them. It writes a lot of code (sometimes needlessley) and creates huge amounts of script to do some very simple operations. This is Dreamweaver's main issue for seasoned developers and like I said it is understandable, but if used sensibly Dreamweaver can still have its place in a developers arsenal.

It is also is quite inflexible with the way creates files in to its structure that it uses for database connections - but this is only a minor issue.

I mentioned on the blog front page that I hope to use this blog to help a business be more profitable. Dreamweaver fits in to this idea perfectly. As a developer, a significant amount of time can be used on the inital stages when design meets the site structure. You can create classes, functions and all manner of time saving techniques to try and make site development more streamlined but if you want to speed up this stage I still stick by Dreamweaver. One of Dreamweaver's finest tools is its ability to help you create CSS and how it can fit in to your site development. CSS in Dreamweaver will allow you to (when your elements are in place) to add an atribute and it will allow you to see immediately how it affects the site's layout rather than loading and refreshing in a browser. If you are creating a site that uses a non-standard layout, this is a fantastic way to do things and will no doubt help you at many stages in the design/structure. Of course you need a fairly good understanding of CSS, but once you have that - page layout becomes a whole lot easier.