I’m really growing to love Eclipse (specifically PHP Development Tools, the PHP extension for it), and how versatile and useful a work environment it is. It really does have everything, and it really helps you get on with what you need to do, when you’re not blogging that is… Now I know why developers have been raving about Eclipse all this time.
One thing I learned today is the huge importance of Perspectives and Views in Eclipse. When Kelvin first said “right, stop using PhpEd, and use this Eclipse thing”, I was overwhelmed by the feature-richness, and my knee-jerk reaction was to just set it up as close to the way I used PhpEd. Thats the first mistake I made, because although I got it close, I missed out on all the glorious features I could’ve been using.
Our Eclipse configuration at work uses Eclipse, PDT, Mylyn, SVN and CollabNet – which integrates wonderfully into our Sourceforge 5.0 server. Mylyn and CollabNet allow task management and allows me to work on Sourceforge artefacts within the Eclipse environment. A rather cool feature is contexts, which allow me to basically attach a list of files to the SF artefact, and when I activate the task in my Task List (note, not “Tasks”, “Task Lists”, a part of Mylyn), it opens all the files I was working on.
Because of our heavy reliance on SourceForge (everything we do has an associated artefact), it makes sense to make use of the CollabNet perspective. If I want to go into “task management mode”, i.e. line up a load of work that has been assigned to me, I switch to the CollabNet perspective. I open an artefact from my assigned artefacts list in the CollabNet view, and it automatically adds it to my Mylyn Task list. I can then say “right, I’m working on this one”, and click a little blob which turns blue, and then I’m working on it. If I’ve been previously working on it, and I attached the context, it automatically opens the files I was working on.
This was meant to be a short homage to Eclipse, but has turned into a little rant, but now that Kelvin set up the SVN repository on Friday properly, we’re actually FINALLY using source control, after the months of me (and Chris) nagging him to get it set up. It’s a little step, but we’re working on the same checkout at the moment, but eventually all that will change. I’ll start bugging him for that soon…
Anyway, if you’re a PHP developer, on a Mac, Windows or Linux, and you’re not using Eclipse PDT yet, I strongly suggest you do so. It’ll make your productivity increase hugely – it did mine!
