Building the Ship - IDE

For discussion about specific tools of the trade and other assorted items needed to equip the joombie with everything they need to embark on their developer journeys.

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ianmac
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Re: Building the Ship - IDE

Post by ianmac » Sun Oct 21, 2007 11:55 pm

can you clarify what you mean?

Ian
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bayness0
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Re: Building the Ship - IDE

Post by bayness0 » Mon Oct 22, 2007 12:37 pm

Yes - trying to run Joomla in an IDE - using Eclipse on Windows XP - Joomla 1.5rc3.

I have installed Joomla and Apanta.  Load in Joomla and get a whole pile of errors and warnings.

Biggest issue seems to be that JHTML does not exist.

:'(

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ianmac
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Re: Building the Ship - IDE

Post by ianmac » Mon Oct 22, 2007 2:37 pm

Do the files exist?  This seems really strange.  Are you using the latest nightly?  What steps are you trying to get it working?

Ian
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http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1997/Itemid,35/
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tekcronic
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Re: Building the Ship - IDE

Post by tekcronic » Wed Oct 24, 2007 4:27 pm

I am just wanting to understand how this all works...forgive me if this is dumb questions but I think this is the place for new or beginning joomla developers.  I guess I just want to clarify a few things.

  • Will J!Code produce a customized version of Joomla that can be installed based on using the J!Build (making it easier
  • Will J!Code assist in making an extension for 1.5?
  • Can someone lay it out nice and simple for those still learning to use IDE's or new to them?

I am not use to using an IDE and I figure if I the faster I transition into this type of environment the faster I will become a better coder...this may or may not be true...we can always hope for the best.  Also I am interested in maybe using the same IDE to create templates...I figure that this will help encourage and assist "Templaters to be Coders" and "Coders to be Templaters."

I hope that was clear enough.

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ianmac
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Re: Building the Ship - IDE

Post by ianmac » Wed Oct 24, 2007 4:56 pm

    tekcronic wrote:I am just wanting to understand how this all works...forgive me if this is dumb questions but I think this is the place for new or beginning joomla developers.  I guess I just want to clarify a few things.

    • Will J!Code produce a customized version of Joomla that can be installed based on using the J!Build (making it easier
    • Will J!Code assist in making an extension for 1.5?
    • Can someone lay it out nice and simple for those still learning to use IDE's or new to them?

I am not use to using an IDE and I figure if I the faster I transition into this type of environment the faster I will become a better coder...this may or may not be true...we can always hope for the best.  Also I am interested in maybe using the same IDE to create templates...I figure that this will help encourage and assist "Templaters to be Coders" and "Coders to be Templaters."

I hope that was clear enough.

1. No.
2. Yes.  J!Code has various wizards that help to build the shell for your Joomla! 1.5 extensions.
3. The long and short of what J!Code will do...
It is an IDE.  This means, as you probably know, that it is an integrated development environment.  It is based on Eclipse.  More information about that can be found at eclipse.org.  Eclipse was originally developed for programming in Java, but it is very extensible and is designed so that plugins can be added so that any language can be used.  An IDE will help you to manage the files that are in your project.  It will also help you to see what is in the file that you are currently working on - i.e. you will see in the main panel what you would normally see in your text editor, but there is a bar on the right that will list the functions that are in that file and classes that are in that file.  This can be used to navigate through your file, because you can just click on the class name and it will move the cursor to that class.

There is functionality to refactor, so that you can rename a class and it will automatically update other references to that class.

There is subversion integration, so that you can checkout, update, and commit files right from the same place you manage your project files.

It also has debugging support, so that you can see exactly what your script is doing.  i.e. you can have your script pause after each line of code is executed, and check on the values of variables during script execution.  This is a nice alternative to using echo and print_r to figure out what is going wrong.

There is planned (it may actually be working, I don't recall what the status was), autocomplete, so that when you start to write code that invokes a function, a list of possible pre-existing functions will pop up, and it will show you what parameters the function takes.  This acts in some respect as a API reference.

There is integrated PHP help, so you can put the cursor over the PHP function and press F1, and it will open up context sensitive help for that function.

There are extension wizards, which I already mentioned.  So the idea with this, is that you click File->New->Project, and you can select the type of project you want to create (Module, Plugin, Component), and select a name for your project, and it will create the basic files that you need for that extension, along with code that is standard for the particular extension, so that all you have to do then is add your code.

A good chunk of this functionality is provided by Eclipse itself.  Some of the functionality is provided by an Eclipse plugin called PHPEclipse, which was developed by a separate group of people, and the rest of the functionality is provided by the JEclipse project, which is a plugin that extends both Eclipse and PHPEclipse to provide the remaining functionality.  The folks who developed PHPEclipse are helping us to put together J!Eclipse.

So there are three main components:
Eclipse, which is the IDE.
PHPEclipse, which is a plugin for Eclipse that provides tools for developing in PHP
J!Eclipse, which is a plugin that provides tools for developing Joomla! extensions.

there are a few other extensions as well.

J!Code is an easy installable package that will include all of the above components in one package.
Hope this helps make things clearer.

Ian
Help test my Component XML Generator Tool!
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1997/Itemid,35/
All feedback appreciated!