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[nycphp-talk] Eclipse, newbie impressions

Gary Mort garyamort at gmail.com
Fri Feb 26 09:17:59 EST 2010


Too many little consoles..  :-)

Which is the main item which has put me off.

Written in Java and needing to know Java to do a lot of extending of
Eclipse[though with PDT going to a markup language for rules, I might be
able to do quite a bit there]

Oddities with network connections:  I went through half a dozen install
processes, and each one broke irrepairably at some point.

Too many versions: which one to use?

PHP code folding inadequacies:  just doesn't fold everything the other IDE's
I've used can.

Source Class browsing failures:  I've yet to see a function like Ultraedit
where an entire project of files is kept up to date for the class/function
browsers.  OTOH you can emulate all this functionality if you document your
code as it will pick up documentation in standard formats.  So here the
"downside" is a matter of getting really good at commenting code that should
be commented anyway!

My setup:

I ended up with the all in one PDT installer. Then I added in the Bzr
plugins for source code repositories.  Then I REMOVED Mylin and installed
the latest version of Mylin....
Then I installed the Mylin/Eclipse Redmine plugin[and installed the server
side 2.6 plugin on my server].  Finally, the one item that caused weird
problems when I installed originally, I loaded the RSE plugins[Remote Server
Environment].  Note: the local one caused me to be unable to open local PHP
files, so the 3rd time around I specifically excluded that one.

I added my Redmine server to the task servers[small nit here: under the
current setup, I cannot get a list of /all/ issues.  I have to add project
by project, and sub project by sub project.  Gotta find out why and fix
that]

Now, outside the "project" concept as I was debugging code that was offsite,
then for the Remote Servers I added my FTP and SFTP servers and was able to
browse those repositories online and open the files directly.  [Note: small
nit here, a LOT of the tools I wanted are kind of hidden.  I had to keep
going to Window->ShowView->Other to get a long list of windows to find a lot
of these things.


Ok, so with all this setup, I had 3 features to change.  So I opened the
first task in my project in eclipse, checked the spec, hit activate, and
then hunted around for the files on the server.  Finally found the oddball
layout and located the 2 PHP files that needed minor changes to.  Updated
and tested them.  Then when I was done, I went back to the task and used the
feature I am now in love with: there will be a tab to "Add Context".....
click on that and you have a list of all open files[or is it files you have
opened?]..   Clicked save and I believe it generates an XML file of all the
file paths/files and zips them up, then it gets attached to the issue.  Next
I close the issue.

So NEXT time I have to make a small change, I can go back to this issue and
open the context from Eclipse and it will automatically open the files from
the FTP server for me.

Second feature, again changed 2 files.  This time I had to dig through a
dozen files to find the area to change and had left them open.  As an
experiment, I went to add context and sure enough, lots of stuff I did not
change was there.  But I could right click and remove items from the context
that were not relevant, and then save them.

Soo... that one feature has me sold.  It was quick and easy and I will live
with all the other little annoyances for now to be able to easily record
which files were changed directly into my project management tool AND be
able to open them later[it's easy to add changed files by adding an issue
keyword to the files and checking into version control - Bazaar can check
files for keywords in the commits and files and update the issue id number
as needed - but that is one way communication, wheras this two way
communication is great!]
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