NetBeans IDE PHP Primer Tutorial
Programming IDEs take a lot of the hard work out of tasks such as compiling and linking in languages such as Java, C, C++, VB.Net and C#. In the case of NetBeans IDE, which this blog introduces to you today (its customary to shake hands, and no Klingon is necessary), it can make PHP into a project environment, which can help a lot to “motor” to a function of choice that you are interested in, in a much faster way than coding PHP with a text editor like TextWrangler can help you achieve. To cut a long story short, there aint nothin’ wrong with a good ol’ IDE, but beware of IDEs in March.
In saying that about IDEs, and how they make programming easier, often with Open Source programming, it is advantageous to know what goes on “under the hood” (or even “in the ‘hood” … chortle, chortle). So if you ever get an opportunity to get helped creating your own makefile (or make it yourself, even with the Sweet Green Icing … knew it could be worked in!) for something, take the opportunity to learn how to do this, as the Open Source world will become a little easier to navigate with such types of knowledge. You’ve got to admire those early designers of computer languages, and those days when all you had was this tiny bit of memory (64k or “into the heliosphere on 8,000 bytes of memory”) to play with to create your program.
In today’s tutorial we simulate a situation where you have a PHP website (subdomain) live and you notice something needing work. Being an organized person you arrange for a NetBeans project to test your changes with a local MAMP webserver. NetBeans calls this a Remote Web Application arrangement and for the synchronization of such an arrangement NetBeans asks for an (s)ftp connection be used, but if you are there with it intact on MAMP you can let the connection “slip” and you will still be able to unit test … particularly if you are watching your download limits (which is happening for me at the minute) … then re-establish the connection to make your changes happen “live”. These are all pretty convenient procedures for PHP work.
NetBeans can be an IDE for much more than PHP … it can supervise Java, C++, Maven, Groovy and HTML/Javascript. In coming days and weeks we’ll look at more.
Link to NetBeans “spiritual home” download page at NetBeans.
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