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Eclipse

The Importance of Preserving Context in Web Development

This morning, when I got down to the particular work task at hand for Imbee, I switched to Eclipse and found it stopped at a breakpoint I had set when debugging a certain crucial issue in my local copy of imbee.com. This was exactly my context from last night.

Speeding up Eclipse PHP debugging by using an external web browser

Today I got my environment for debugging PHP web pages working much more snappily, and I'm excited to share my tips. My experience only applies directly to you if you are running Eclipse and debugging PHP on a Macintosh with OS X.

Debugging locally using Eclipse, MAMP, and virtual domains

When setting up debug configurations for Eclipse, I often have my files living in a subdirectory of my web server root. For example, at directory drydock/ I have a full replica of whatever live site I am working on.

On my hosting, I have the same directory structure and a subdomain set up so that drydock.crotown.com maps to the drydock subdirectory. Then the site drydock.crotown.com lets me put changes on the web for testing and approval, before the actual live site is touched.

Drupal, Eclipse, and PDT development workflow -- the big picture

Setting up my Drupal development environment based on Eclipse with PDT and the Zend debugger took me a huge amount of time. Searching on drupal.org yields a lot of configuration details for Eclipse, and Web-wide searches yield detailed setup instructions for various combinations of software versions and operating systems. But what finally helped me over my last, and most time-consuming, challenges was the workflow discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/2663.

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