Tips and Tricks of coding with Zend Studio for Eclipse – Part 2

Join Peter MacIntyre for a special webinar on ‘Tips and Tricks coding with Zend Studio for Eclipse – Part 2′. The participants can greatly benefit from this webinar by learning the key Zend concepts & features including Views, Perspectives and basic area of coding environment.

Zend Studio for Eclipse is the premier coding environment for PHP. With multiple integration points, features, and tools the modern PHP developer needs to know how to use this product for efficient coding. In this webinar Peter will cover the basic areas of the coding environment, spending most of the time on the PHP Perspective.

Register Now by Clicking at the link below:
Monday, June 27, 2011 at 2 PM BST
Monday, June 27, 2011 at 12:30pm EST
Duration: 1 hour

What You Will Learn?

In the second part of webinar, Peter will cover the following topics:

1. PHPDoc tag entries
2. Connecting dependent projects (Configuring projects)
3. Function definitions in content assist
4. Using the Properties view to full effect
5. Using PHPDoc tags for documentation
6. PHP Code Gallery
7. Working Sets

More Preferences settings:

•    Key Mapping
•    Code Analyzer
•    Code Assist settings
•    Cursor Hovering feature
•    Settings in the Tasks view
•    Code Templates

About Peter MacIntyre:
Peter MacIntyre has over 20 years of experience in the information technology industry, primarily in the area of software development. He is certified by ZEND Corporation on PHP 4.x and has contributed writing material for Using Visual Objects (Que Corp.), Using PowerBuilder 5 (Que Corp.), ASP.NET Bible (Wiley Pub.), and Web Warrior Survey on Web Development Languages (Course Technology). Most recently he has co-authored the Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer’s Guide – Addison-Wesley.

Peter is a PHP Programmer, author, consultant and trainer and lives in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He is Senior Solutions Consultant with Zend Center of Excellence at OSSCube.

About OSSCube:
OSSCube is proud to be consistently rated as one of the best PHP Solutions companies in the world. Simply speaking..“If Its PHP we do it Best !”. OSSCube is also the world’s first Zend Center of Excellence, housing best of breed PHP expertise and development practices, which has established us as a “preferred partner” for Outsourced Product Development engagements. Our partnerships with leading open source technology/product provider including Acquia (Drupal), SugarCRM (Gold Partner),  and EnterpriseDB (Global SI Partner) empower us to deliver innovative, on time and cost effective open source solutions to business globally through our delivery centers in USA, UK and India. Learn more at php.osscube.com

Tips and Tricks coding with Zend Studio for Eclipse – Part 1

Join Peter MacIntyre for a special webinar on ‘Tips and Tricks coding with Zend Studio for Eclipse – Part 1’. The participants can greatly benefit from this webinar by learning the key Zend concepts & features including Views, Perspectives and basic area of coding environment.

Zend Studio for Eclipse is the premier coding environment for PHP. With multiple integration points, features, and tools the modern PHP developer needs to know how to use this product for efficient coding. In this webinar Peter will cover the basic areas of the coding environment, spending most of the time on the PHP Perspective.

Register Now by Clicking at the link below:
Mon, Jun 6, 2011 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM BST
Mon, Jun 6, 2011 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM EDT

Duration: 1 hour

What You Will Learn?

In this practical session, Peter will cover the following topics:

1. PHP Perspective – what is it, how to customize the views
2. Making the coding environment your own
3. Syntax coloring – adjusting the options to your own preferences
4. Code folding, Code formatting, Project link to Editor
5. The Marker Bar – what it shows you
6. The Problems view
7. The Tasks view
8. The outline View – very valuable in OOP programming

About Peter MacIntyre:
Peter MacIntyre has over 20 years of experience in the information technology industry, primarily in the area of software development. He is Zend Certified Engineer and has contributed writing material for Using Visual Objects (Que Corp.), Using PowerBuilder 5 (Que Corp.), ASP.NET Bible (Wiley Pub.), and Web Warrior Survey on Web Development Languages (Course Technology). Most recently he has co-authored the Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer’s Guide – Addison-Wesley.

Peter is a PHP Programmer, author, consultant and trainer and lives in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He is Senior Solutions Consultant with Zend Center of Excellence at OSSCube.

About OSSCube:
OSSCube is proud to be consistently rated as one of the best PHP Solutions companies in the world. Simply speaking..“If Its PHP we do it Best !”. OSSCube is also the world’s first Zend Center of Excellence, housing best of breed PHP expertise and development practices, which has established us as a “preferred partner” for Outsourced Product Development engagements. Our partnerships with leading open source technology/product provider including Acquia (Drupal), SugarCRM (Gold Partner),  and EnterpriseDB (Global SI Partner) empower us to deliver innovative, on time and cost effective open source solutions to business globally through our delivery centers in USA, UK and India. Learn more at php.osscube.com

Getting started with Zend Studio for Eclipse: What can we do with views and perspectives.

In my last blog on Zend Studio for Eclipse, I introduced you to the concept of Views and what they were in basic terms. We also looked at Workspaces and talked about the general appearance of the IDE. This time around, we will look more closely at what we can do with these views and perspectives.

To recap: A view is a tabbed interface area that Zend Studio uses for a specific task.
If you open up the view selection dialog window (Window->Show View-> Other… or the keyboard combination of Alt+Shift+Q, then Q) you will see a full listing of all the views that are available, organized into their respective categories.

This is shown in the image above. Here I have expanded the listing of views for the General category, but there are 18 categories in all with an overall total of 88 views. These views can be mixed and matched as much as you want, and the good thing is that you can save your own collection of views under a saved name for future use.

Another good thing that ZSE provides is a number of predefined collections of views for you. Whether you make your own collection of views or you use one that ZSE provides they are collectively called Perspectives. There are 18 pre-defined Perspectives. If you do define your own perspective you can save it with the Window -> Save Perspective As… menu combination. Once you have selected a perspective to work within you can easily adjust them by adding, removing, or re-sizing any of the views.

As you would expect, the reason that ZSE provides some default Perspectives for you is that following the idea of having views in categories, they are designed to help with certain programming tasks: PHP coding, code debugging, accessing code repositories (SVN / CVS), interacting with databases, or performing XML work, just to name a few. To switch between perspectives, take note of the Perspectives bar on the right hand side of the tool bar. This has the ability to grow and shrink with the number of perspectives that you use on a regular basis, and allows you to quickly switch between any perspectives in the entire listing of them.

Well I hope you can get familiar with navigating between views and adjusting your perspectives to accomplish the tasks that you want to do within ZSE. Next time I will take you into the details of the PHP Perspective and what can be accomplished with the code writing views.

Read more: Zend Studio

Getting started with Zend Studio for Eclipse: Views, Perspectives, and Workspaces

I am Peter MacIntyre and beginning with this post, I will start my series on Zend Studio at the OSSCube blog. Since, this is the first post, I will start with a rather straight forward topic; that of getting underway with setting up the programming environment in Zend Studio for Eclipse – the next generation in the Zend Studio IDE family. We will not cover the installation procedure as that is fairly easy on each platform.  We will just take a look at the environment after a fresh install.

In this series, I will write on a progressive basis showing the reader more Zend Studio for Eclipse tips, tricks, and best practices; so stay tuned, this is only the beginning.

What we will be doing in this post is to introduce you to the basic look of the Zend Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Take a look at the following image. This is the basic environment that you will see once you open Zend Studio for Eclipse (ZSE) for the first time and close the welcome screen. Here, there are a number of tabbed interfaces called views.

What is a view? Generally speaking every tab area in the Eclipse IDE is known as a View and a collection of views is known as a Perspective. One great thing about ZSE is that you can open and close, re-size, and relocate views. As well, you can save your re-arrangements as your own custom perspectives. ZSE comes with many pre-defined perspectives and this first one (shown in the image) is known as the PHP Perspective.

On the left hand side you will see a column showing the active project or projects in the PHP Explorer view. This view is where you can control all the files in a project or multiple projects. In this case we are looking at the ExampleProject and three entities that are attached to it.

When ZSE opens up it starts by looking for a Workspace. This is a folder on your development machine where all your projects are stored. You can have multiple workspace locations defined if you want. To change from one workspace to another simply use the file->Switch Workspace->Other menu combination to open up the dialog box that will allow you to select a different folder where you may have another workspace of projects defined. If you do decide to switch to a different workspace, ZSE will have to restart in order to read in all the associated settings and particulars that are defined for that new workspace.

That is all for my initial blog, stay tuned as we continue to dig deeper into ZSE and its many benefits, features, and integration points.

For More About: Zend Framework Development