Setting up a PHP5 development environment

PHP5 now includes greatly enhanced support for OOP (using classes and objects rather than mainly procedural code). PHP4 supported objects but it was very limited IMO. I wanted to get up to speed with PHP5 so installed a new development environment on Windows XP. At the same time I installed an IDE for developing PHP code. I also think that if you want to learn about OOP programming, PHP may be one of the easiest ways to do it, mainly due to the quality of the online documentation and examples available at www.php.net (my favorite website LOL).

At first I tried to install Apache web server but couldn't get it to recognize paths to mysql dlls. This seems to be a common problem with all kinds of workarounds suggested online. Also I had problems getting xdbug.dll to work. Then I discovered xamp which makes the process of setting up a local WAMP server very easy. You can download it from: www.apachefriends.org This setup contains the latest PHP, MySQL and Apache server. Plus it has a great interface to check PHP settings etc.

It comes with xdebug which I wanted for use with the IDE (NetBeans). But, to enable it you need to edit the php.ini files (there are 2). Here is a tutorial on that: http://malibugarage.blogspot.com/2007/07/last-week-i-got-xamppeclipse-pdtxdebug.html In the latest version of xamp I found that all I had to do was comment zlib stuff and uncomment xdebug stuff (including the xdebug module entry) and restart the server.

NetBeans is a powerful IDE that includes version control, syntax highlighting and debugging. It also supports multiple platforms and technologies. You can download it from: http://www.netbeans.org/

All the above is free software too!

Time to get programming ...

Udate: I don't think the debugger feature works with windows XP. It connects but it does not stop at break points. I suspect it is to do with difficulty resolving paths to files which is the problem you get when trying to set up the apache webserver on windows.

Finally to get this working I installed Linux Shocked

(ubuntu) running inside VirtualBox on my XP machine. Then in Linux I installed: xampp, Java SDK, Java JRE, xdebug and NetBeans.

Helpful links in getting it working:

Virtual Box - to be able to run Linux in parallel with Windows on a windows machine and easily flip between OS's.

Change Screen Resolution For Ubuntu 8.04 Running Under VirtualBox I set mine to 1680x1050 with 24 bit color. Works fine.

The http document root in xampp on Linux is not accessible from Netbeans so I edited the httpd file in /opt/lampp/etc/ to have an alias for a /home/user/www folder So the url: http://localhost/www/ now points to files in my user area in a www folder. So now this folder can be specified as the document root in NetBeans. I wanted to preserve access to the xampp local web page which has useful links to admin features such as phpmyadmin, that's why I didn't specify a new default document root.

The line of code is:
Alias /www /home/user/www

where user, is your user name.

See:
Mapping URLs to Filesystem Locations

In the NetBeans documentation they suggest setting up a virtual server which I didn't like the idea of. My way is much simpler I think.

Another tip: with ubuntu you can precede commands that require admin privileges with the word: sudo

To understand how to do basic things in Linux, you are best off searching online with a well crafted search phrase since there are plenty of solutions posted on blogs and forums. But, you can waste a lot of time finding up to date suggestions that actually solve your problem. I am a Linux newbie but with ubuntu much of the command line stuff can be avoided by using the GUI tools.

I must say that ubuntu was extremely easy to install on my system and installing all the extras I needed was easy too with some being automatically downloaded after keying in some commands, plus I didn't need to study how to use it apart from searching on how to install certain kinds of compressed files. Virtual Box seems great too, much better than having a dual boot system I think.