PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...
Development Tools (PDT) is a language IDE plugin for the
Eclipse platform and the
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
project that develops it.
The project intends to encompass all tools necessary to develop PHP based software. It uses the existing Eclipse Web Tools Project to provide developers with PHP capabilities. All these PHP tools are easy to use and developers can speed up the development process by using these tools. Additional plugins are available as
PDT Extensions.
Key features
PHP editor
* Syntax Highlighting
* Content Assist
* Code Formatter
* Refactoring
* Code Templates
Easy and powerful code navigation
Debugging and profiling
* Zend Debugger
* Xdebug
Syntax validation
Primary modules
*Core —
parser
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term '' ...
, search
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...
, communication and more
*Debug — protocols, messages, executable and
web server
A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...
*User Interface — editor, views, preferences and
wizards
*Formatter — advanced code formatter
*Refactoring — PHP refactoring support
*PHPUnit —
PHPUnit
PHPUnit is a unit testing framework for the PHP programming language. It is an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks that originated with SUnit and became popular with JUnit. PHPUnit was created by Sebastian Bergmann an ...
Support
*Composer —
Composer
A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music.
Etymology and def ...
Support
*Profiler — Xdebug and Zend Debugger profiling support
Project timeline
The project officially began around March 8, 2006. By the end of 2006, the project was approaching the 0.7 release. On April 6, 2007, 0.7 RC3 was released as the final 0.7 version.
In the latter half of 2007, a series of 1.0 milestones were reached, and on September 18, 2007, PDT 1.0 Final was released.
Naming issues
The PHP Development Tools project has had two names during its development. It was initially named PHP Development Tools, then changed to PHP IDE, and reverted to PHP Development Tools on January 1, 2007. Various documentation and reviews use either name.
Zend Technologies contributions
Significant PDT development is being done by Zend Technologies. Zend sells a competing product named
Zend Studio
Zend Studio is a commercial, proprietary integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP developed by Zend Technologies, based on the PHP Development Tools (PDT) plugin for the Eclipse platform (the PDT project is led by Zend).
Zend Studio is t ...
. PDT, as free software, may cannibalize sales of Zend Studio although the latter has more features. Others contend that PDT is deliberately maintained as a "lite" version of Zend Studio.
References
External links
PHP Development Tools project page
Eclipse (software)
Free software programmed in PHP
Software using the Eclipse Public License
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