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Hello, all!

I have a couple questions regarding setting up and configuring a working development environment.

First, I have set up xampp and two local installations of Joomla! 1.0x and 1.5x under Xubuntu. Works great on both my laptop and desktop. I have installed some editors, such as Vim, Emacs, and Bluefish along with the Eclipse IDE (with XDebug plugin). All work fine. However, I would like opinions and suggestions on how to setup the best environment to work in.

For example, the way I have the J! installations setup is in ~/public_html/. I also have my Eclipse environment set up in ~/Development/workspace/. Within this workspace directory, there are three sub-directories. ~/Development/workspace/joomla/, ~/Development/workspace/joomla/joomla1.0x/ and ~/Development/workspace/joomla/joomla1.5x/ . Both of those directories contain all directories and files of Joomla! 1.0x and 1.5x imported from ~/public_html/.

I had hoped to import all dir's and files, toy around with them and export any changed files overwriting the existing...however it's not going quite that smoothly. Biggest issue is file ownership and permissions. In ~/public_html/, all sub-directories and files are owned by nobody:user. If I import them, they get imported but the file ownership changes to user:user, which isn't a big deal, except when I want to export them back out. It simply won't let me overwrite the files because I am not the owner. If I fire off a terminal and invoke Eclipse as root, I can overwrite them as expected, however it seems to be a pain to be logged in as root to mess around with any code.

Now comes my questions...

1. Is there a better way to set this up, or just say to hell with it, run as root?

2. Which is the best way to edit the code? The IDE or another editor (Bluefish, emacs, Vim)? All seem to work fine, however I am trying to use the coding standards given on the Dev site. In particular with regards to indentations, etc., etc.. I can/have set this up just fine in both Vim and Emacs...however Bluefish doesn't like to play along nor does Eclipse. At least I cannot get them to play nicely at the moment.

3. Is an IDE overkill? Meaning, what are your opinions with regards to using one, in particular as a learning tool. I can do just about the same thing I have been doing with Eclipse just using a text editor, save the files and test locally, then upload to host. I don't intend on creating some crazy component/plugin with 10,000 lines of code, I am just wanting to teach myself PHP by poking around at the Joomla! core code and various component/mambot/plugin code. If I can create a component/mambot/plugin along the way...great, but that's not really my focus, at least for the time being.

Any and all suggestions, opinions, and/or guidance is welcome... Thanks!


Chad

I think the best way to edit code is by hand but learning to use an IDE is very useful and a time saver. look into J!code it is something I would like to revive.

Also I prefer to use Aptana instead of Eclipse even though I could use the plug-in but it I have not really tried to set-up Eclipse and it seems to be very recommended by other programmers. I will be looking into it shortly and branching it to meet my own needs if I can find the time.

I prefer to do most of it by hand if I can. I had been reading the Dev Wiki with regards to using Eclipse, so I figured I give it a whirl. I downloaded J!Code, but haven't set it up just yet...I'll play with it at some point in time. I remember something about Aptana some time ago, but never monkied with it too much. Installed it, launched it...twitched a couple times, and haven't messed with it since. I'll have to check it out again...

With regards to the import/export issue, I have worked that out. Made the necessary changes to who can run httpd in httpd.conf and changed ownership of my Joomla! installation directories.

Also instead of importing and exporting the changes, I decided to set up a Php Project titled Joomla! and create 'linked' directories to my Joomla! installations. Anytime Eclipse launches, these directories are opened as current projects and I can edit and test on a local site without the need of any additional steps. Unless of course I break something...


Chad