"Must have" tools

**OfficeOfTheLaw** · Mar 16, 2005, 23:07

CASE tools... a must for every serious software developer. I'm wondering what kind of tools the rest of you use for project management (I know I know... i bring this topic up quite often.. just interests me I suppose).

Currently, I've been integrating the following into my projects with great success:

argoUML - this has been great for quickly drawing up class diagrams and kind of having a preemptive documentation approach... I try to describe methods and properties as much as possible, and it's easy to rework and analyze visual models, and the php code generation is awesome.

SimpleTest - I've gotten into a habit of writing unit tests for the classes and/or packages I've only modeled but haven't quite written the actual code... I am still working on getting some kind of automation scripts to check code out of repositories and unit test them nightly.

Subversion - I still can't believe that I used to rename files with silliness like .bak, .bak12-23-04, etc. With revision control, my team has been able to work on code without having to instant message someone and ask them if they have it open, or worry about breaking things permanently.

phpDocumentor - just because I know how to use a class and have it's method memorized, doesn't mean the next person does.

XDebug - great for backtracing errors.

Anything else? I know most of these can be dropped for other ones, like PHPUnit rather than SimpleTest, or Dia, Visio, Rational Rose, etc. instead of argoUML, but you get the gist of it.

**McGruff** · Mar 17, 2005, 00:39

SimpleTest, Subversion, Xdebug (for occasional profiling).

Don't seem to need UML diagrams much. If I do I'll just use Freehand. Some interesting comments here: Is Design Dead?.

Regex Coach is handy.

**Tanus** · Mar 17, 2005, 00:56

I'll substitute argoUML with Poseidon (based on argo, but last I checked a whole lot more developed). And I'll second regex coach, it's just plain handy.

**topsmith** · Mar 17, 2005, 05:00

I will add phing ( http://phing.info ) and vim/eclipse as editors.

**sweatje** · Mar 17, 2005, 07:41

IMHO you missed:

Your favorite text editor with PHP syntax highlighting
Firefox
http://www.php.net/manual/en/

**escape164** · Mar 17, 2005, 09:13

Just some links for those that find this thread in the future. I would also suggest making a post on the PHP Wiki if one doesn't exist yet with these tools.

ArgoUML - http://argouml.tigris.org

SimpleTest - http://www.lastcraft.com/simple_test.php & http://simpletest.sourceforge.net/

Subversion - http://subversion.tigris.org/

phpDocumentor - http://www.phpdoc.org/

XDebug - http://xdebug.org/

Regex Coach - http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/

Phing - http://phing.info/

Vim - http://vim.org

Eclipse - http://eclipse.org & http://www.phpeclipse.de/tiki-view_articles.php

PHP Manual - http://www.php.net/manual/en/

All of the above are great projects that help to make code better. I am pretty familiar with everything except Phing, XDebug (will be looking into this) and Regex Coach (already downloaded!). For anyone who does not know Vim, don't be intimidated. It took me almost 6 months to really learn Vim well. But, that work has paid off tremendously. Opinions about other text editors aside, I think you'd be hard pressed to find something as powerful as Vim in such a small and capable package.

**stereofrog** · Mar 17, 2005, 09:26

Originally Posted by sweatje

IMHO you missed:

Your favorite text editor with PHP syntax highlighting
Firefox
http://www.php.net/manual/en/

And what about :

- pen
- piece of paper
- brain

I'm using NuSphere btw. IDE is rather middling, but debugger is ok.

**kyberfabrikken** · Mar 17, 2005, 09:28

argoUML has nice features for java->uml generation. Does anybody know if something like php->uml exists ?
The closest I got is Waterproof:UML. The php-parsing capabilities are great, but unfortunately the program itself is very limited. It does supply XMI-export, but I can't get argoUML to read it.

**sweatje** · Mar 17, 2005, 09:35

Originally Posted by stereofrog

And what about :

- pen
- piece of paper
- brain

First two are obsolete with the advent of a printable whiteboard and dry erase markers

**@rt** · Mar 17, 2005, 09:45

http://www.mindjet.com/
MindManager

**Dr Livingston** · Mar 17, 2005, 09:46

In some cases, the third one is just as obsolete...

I use Simple Test, just whenever I can get around to it I suppose, but not yet all the time. Takes me an age to adjust to changes

Dumped Dreamweaver MX the other week, in favour of jEdit which is lighter on my processor (P4 2Ghz), and I like the interface. Best bit.

Other tools? None, but I don't like changes so it takes a while to move towards that I suppose. Did install the PDO extension, now starting to use that if that's any help?

**OfficeOfTheLaw** · Mar 17, 2005, 10:14

Originally Posted by kyberfabrikken

argoUML has nice features for java->uml generation. Does anybody know if something like php->uml exists ?
The closest I got is Waterproof:UML. The php-parsing capabilities are great, but unfortunately the program itself is very limited. It does supply XMI-export, but I can't get argoUML to read it.

I'm considering writing my own module or something to do this (seems like it would be somewhat simple enough), but there was some python script I used awhile back that was able to generate uml for dia from php sources.

It was rather broken though, but it did the job (if you didn't mind renaming the occasional arguement lists it frequently jumbled).

I think that argoUML offshoot can do it, but unsure.

**OfficeOfTheLaw** · Mar 17, 2005, 10:24

Oh yeah... and I'd say PEAR has proven to be quite useful to me. Just this last week I wrote a multi-page form for a bank that had a variable number of pages depending on what you enter (at maximum, 10), had complete validation, and at the end generated a PDF, which is sent via encrypted email to the bank, and displayed to the user for their records.

I used PEAR::QuickFormController, PEAR::Mail, PEAR::Mail_Mime, and my custom GPG class and pdfTemplate class. Needless to say, entire development time: 8 hours (inlcuding unit tests).

**kyberfabrikken** · Mar 17, 2005, 12:18

I found this thread. Looks really nice. Did anybody try something similar for php4 ?

**lastcraft** · Mar 17, 2005, 16:30

Hi...

Originally Posted by OfficeOfTheLaw

I am still working on getting some kind of automation scripts to check code out of repositories and unit test them nightly.

Rephlux does this: http://rephlux.sourceforge.net/

yours, Marcus

**OfficeOfTheLaw** · Mar 17, 2005, 19:02

Originally Posted by lastcraft

Hi...

Rephlux does this: http://rephlux.sourceforge.net/

yours, Marcus

As usual Marcus, a life saver.

**djdykes** · Mar 18, 2005, 02:35

HTML Kit (editor with syntax highlighting)

PHP manual...

Firefox

**pointbeing** · Mar 18, 2005, 03:16

No-one mentioned Linux yet?

Simply a better place from which to develop.

Umm yeah, other must haves: SimpleTest, a bit more discipline to test consistently would be nice, grep, Martin Fowler, a brain, a pencil (and eraser), an increasing dependency on Zend Studio, a bit of courage from time to time, and b3ta.com is what gets me through the day

**Musicbox** · Mar 18, 2005, 04:14

i will recommend newbies to use 1stpage from http://evrsoft.com which is an excellent editor tool.

**flash2** · Mar 18, 2005, 05:17

DBMS TOOL

should include phpMyAdmin for those LAMP development
and IB Expert for those use firebird/interbase

References / Help files

php_manual_en.chm
html40.chm
ClientGuideJS13.pdf
ClientReferenceJS13.pdf

for browser, i suggess test under both IE and Firefox, most users still using IE.

**adamp** · Mar 18, 2005, 05:25

I'll add Zend on the IDE front. Best one I've used for PHP, with good class/function/include listing for files/project; cloning windows is very handy among other bits.

EDIT: BTW, that Regex Coach is a god-send! Very useful tool indeed, can't believe I hadn't found it before now.

**MikeBigg** · Mar 18, 2005, 05:58

HTML Kit (editor with syntax highlighting)

Seconded. It does so much more than HTML editing. It is badly named, imho.

For MySQL admin ... MySQL-Front (free version) beats anything else I have tried.

Mike

**dylanegan** · Mar 18, 2005, 07:02

Originally Posted by pointbeing

No-one mentioned Linux yet?

Simply a better place from which to develop.

That's a definite. Or from my iBook.

On my gentoo box i use bluefish because it has syntax highlighting which is all I need. SVN for versioning management, mysql and postgresql and php5.

Unit testing and I think that's it. Manual is helpful and sitepoint comes in second.

Soon i'll be adding Phing, hopefully Rephlux and on the site side for must have tools will be a new installer based on portage.

**adamp** · Mar 18, 2005, 08:11

Forgot to add one of the self-installing LAMP packages like Nusphere's Tech Platform - good for setting up a test/development environment on your Windows PC.

**shakin** · Mar 18, 2005, 08:49

This thread should be stickied. These are all excellent posts that I will refer back to many times.

I use several invaluable free tools:

- ColorPic for grabbing colors from the screen.

- WinSCP when transfering files from Windows to a Linux server

- Putty for SSH from Windows

- TopStyle Lite for CSS editing

- Filezilla for FTP transfers

- AppServ for a quick Windows install of Apache/PHP/MySQL

- Ubuntu Guide to quickly get a few things setup in Warty

- Slightly off topic, but a second video card or a dual head card so you can run two monitors will do wonders for your productivity. I can't live without it.

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