Friday, February 22, 2008

php Development Tools (PDT) Community News

It's funny how differently developers act in 'release cycle' vs. 'development cycle' . While during the first we are busy with users' feedback but we lack of any intellectual challenges , the latter is calm and quite but full of energy and programming disputes. PDT version 1.1 development cycle has begun and we need an extent of "noise" from our community so we won't lose our way. You are more than welcome to advise us now.

PDT v1.1 Development Cycle
Taken from Ohloh's Eclipse PDT page

So what's keeping us busy these days?

1. Revising Modeling Techniques – Its time to catch up Eclipse's standards. We have decides that our previous modeling technique is getting oldish. So naturally we are targeting JDT's concepts with adaptation to the php dynamic binding nature (given by the DLTK project).

2. Code Manipulation – sometimes the editor should generate new code or even rewrite an existing code. This is an excellent mechanism for such kind of tasks. Also a great advantage is that we catching up JDT's standards on these capabilities as well so many of JDT's features are quickly portable to php.

3. UI enhancements – this is the part that our community should be most happy to hear about. Since infra was enhanced , more and more UI features are available. Taking for example mark occurrences, override indicators, better code completion, fast searching, quick fixes and more.

Exit Execution Paths are marked in PDT 1.1 Editor

4. Upgrading our Dependencies – While most of Eclipse 3.4 enhancements are infra related, Web Tools 3.0 brings the Ajax tools into their editor and this is automatically brings it to the php environment. Editing, browsing, launching, code assisting, folding, and more features are now available for the JavaScript side as well.


5. Unit testing – Well... maybe it won't be an interest of any of our users but still it is worth mentioning. We have tripled our unit testing to provide stability and regression testing to PDT. It seems that it also makes the whole development cycle more fun to us!