FB Series: Choosing an PHP IDE

By ben | Published: July 18, 2009

What are the contenders?

Netbeans 6.7 with PHP support
Aptana 1.5 (standalone or Eclipse plugin)
Zend Studio 6.1.2 (not free ;( )

My experiences:

  • Code completion/parser in Netbeans better than Aptana (Aptana also crashes / gets in a endless loop at points when it cannot parse / code assist a file resulting in java heap exhaustion / cpu up 50%)
  • Aptana browser integration & debugger integration is better. I like the tab away browser, and the debugger xdebug works more reliable than in Netbeans – however still has its times when it does just not attach
  • Zend Studio: set up was not working ok for me, couldn’t get the debugger working. Script only debugging works.

After switching back and forth between Aptana, Netbeans and Zend studio I guess I settled now with Netbeans. I might startup Aptana occasionally if i have debugger issues. It would be really great if the xdebugger would just work on Netbeans…

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FB Series: Java Guy starting with FB development

By ben | Published: July 18, 2009

I recently started with PHP development. Although I have had some small exposure to the
language before, this was my first real project.

What are the big differences to the Java (web) development experience?

  • interpreted (no compiler to check for errors, just a parser)
  • dynamically typed (->no “parse-time” type checking in the IDE ..)
  • essential procedural, object handling completely rewrittten from version 4 to 5 now basic oo functionality
  • hunderts of statically callable base function; e.g. very easy to download & store a file: $contents = file_get_contents($url). However you see that many things grew historically without a overall concept: how do you test the existence of a substring in a string strstr | strrpos | stripos (hint 0 equals false))
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FB Series: Locally debug your PHP Facebook App

By ben | Published: July 10, 2009

Starting with Facebook applications is a rather a bumpy road. First there is the scattered and often not up-to-date documentation on the Facebook wiki. Its a pain to go through. But ok once you managed to get the important bits its ok.

What I am talking about is the testing. Its quite astonishing that this is not thought through at all: Facebook does not offer a Test environment (!). So this means developers have to test their apps in the real Facebook which means. Developers have to create 2 apps one for test one for prod with different configurations canvas urls etc. as well as create Testusers - or they want to annoy their friends with test apps.

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