One of the powerful features of an IDE like Eclipse is the ability for it to "read" your code and give you some assistance about your API as you type. This could include things like class property or methods names, constants, functions, argument lists, and so on. Eclipse/PDT and ZendStudio do this by parsing a PHP class directly, but they also look at your docblocks and some other special comments where the raw PHP is not enough. This article is a bag of tricks that help you get the most out of code assistance using Eclipse/PDT or Zend Studio in those awkward corners of your code that you might have through previously inaccessible.

Among his tips are things like adding "@var" declarations to help with code completion, type hinting on methods/functions, using the "@property" annotation and using a "this" trick to override what class the IDE sees as the local object. ,/p>]]> Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:55:32 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/17133 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/17133 If you're a Zend Studio user and have been wondering how to hook it directly into the phpcloud service from Zend, Kevin Schroeder has posted complete instructions in a new post today (complete with screenshots).

PHPCloud.com is the landing page for our new cloud offering. Using the Zend Application Fabric you can build your applications in the same environment as you will be deploying your apps to. The application is built on my.phpcloud.com and you can then deploy it onto any platform where the Fabric is supported. But how do you get started? Phpcloud.com has been built in a way where you can connect with any IDE. With Zend Studio 9 that connectivity has been built directly in to the IDE.

It's a simple six (well, technically seven) step process that involves setting up a new project, configuring some deployment options and hitting "deploy". Zend Studio makes it super simple to launch your application as many times as you need - a one-click deploy once things are all set up.

The solution is similar to what I did with Debugging an RPC call in Zend Framework. What this does is set the cookies from the remote browser to debug on the local instance of the Zend debugger. To kick it off simply open up the URL to the debug kickoff page. That will set the cookies in your mobile browser. Then go to the page that you want to debug from your mobile phone and reload it.

He includes the code you'll need (a method to drop into your Controller) to make that debugging work. It sets up an array of cookie values and, when the page to debug is reloaded, those values will be set again and the IDE (in his case, Zend Studio) will catch them as a key to start debugging.

Eclipse Helios (3.6) includes an improved version of Eclipse PDT, labeled 2.2. It is also included in the current Zend Studio (7.1 and above). Among other enhancements, it dramatically improved the performance of code lookup-related tasks like searching references, creating a type hierarchy and even code completion.

Some of the recommendations have more to do with the system the IDE is running on, but they're helpful none the less:

• Disable virus scanners
• Use a fast storage device
• Keep your JVM up to date
• Delete the database if your experience problems
• Do not backup the database

If you have some extension, create stub file with PHPDOC descriptions [...] for each extension function, Studio will know to pick it up. You can put this file into Studio's prototypes directory - easiest way to find it is just write something like chdir() anywhere, select the name and press F3, the directory of the file that you'll get is the one you need.

Not wanting to have to generate all of the stubs himself, he created the Reflector script that will, when pointed at an extension, create the stub file with definitions for each method it can use. There's also the generator script that's a part of Zend Studio that works similarly.

Given that Zend has had a professional relationship with Adobe for a while, I have been looking for the time to actually dive into what Flash was offering so I could make some kind of judgment call on it. [...] With that in mind, I would like to talk about some introductory topics on what it would take to get a basic Flash/Flex application up and running. This will be part 1 of an X part series. I don't know how many parts there will be, but I would expect that there would be a few.

He walks you through the full process of using Flash Builder 4 (a 60 day free trial is available) and Zend Studio/Eclipse PDT to set up a native environment for rapid development of Flex apps. He creates the basic "Hello World" app, showing how to connect PHP to the Flex application and a bit of additional work to get it to cooperate with a MVCed Zend Framework application too.

One problem we have with the current versions of Zend Studio is that its default Zend Framework formatter is not consistent with the official Zend Framework coding standard. Luckily, that can be easily fixed. Sandy Pleyte, one of our developers, created a formatting file for Zend Studio that does adhere to the formal standard. There might be a few issues here and there but we've found it to work much better than the default one in Zend Studio.

If you're a Zend Studio user and want to get a little less frustrated at the formatting it uses for your applications, download the tool and follow the instructions in the post to get it working in your IDE.

For the first problem:

OSX Leopard, it has seemed for a while, like the app was decaying - growing progressively crashier the more I used it. Literally, to the point where I could use it. I think, however, I have solved the issue. [...] This just explicitly makes it use JVM 1.5, which is, after all, what it was built for.

And for the second (text selection):

If you are still using Zend Studio 5.5, and recently upgrade to Snow Leopard, you will have spotted pretty quickly there is a pretty severe display bug when selecting text. The reason for this, is that Snow Leopard only ships with Java 1.6 and 1.3 (wtf?) [...] It essentially comes down to this: Grab the Java 1.5 JDK from Leopard (original) and then tell OSX to use the 32bit version by default.

You can find out more information on the cause of this problem here.

I have been using Zend Studio For Eclipse for over a year now and although I started using it around version 5.5, which was rocky to say the least, I am currently using version 6.1.2. and testing 7.0 Beta--which seems rather promising with its error reporting even extending to Zend Server, should you have that installed as a localhost. Throughout the past year I have become rather attached to "my Zend" and I can honestly say that after trying another (Free) Eclipse based IDE I found myself gravitating back to "my Zend" faster than the "Other One" could uninstall itself.

He talks about the IDE's interface, the installation process and includes some screenshots of the user interfaces for repository browsing and code navigation (and manual reference support!)

I write quite a lot of command line utilities in PHP and luckily PDT makes it easy to debug command line scripts. The thing with command line scripts is that often they require parameters passed on the command line, and PDT offers an easy way to pass them when you debug a script.

He quickly illustrates (with a few screenshots) how to get the debugger to prompt for the values of the PHP script you've selected. You can also use a similar technique in other Eclipse-based IDEs (like Zend Studio or Aptana).