Eclipse PDT - one of many useful work tools | Bus error: Jake Billo's weblog

Eclipse PDT - one of many useful work tools

2007-10-15 02:30 PM | 3 comments

Just checked out the Eclipse SVN site and apparently the issue with dashes in new PHP filenames has been resolved. I upgraded my work copy to the latest nightly build and things seem to be going well. (The October 1st integration build might be better stability-wise, but I've had good luck with the nightly builds.)

For the record, after the upgrade, loading my workspace took about five minutes (Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz, 1GB RAM) with no discernable progress bar or CPU activity. Eclipse effectively looks like it's frozen. Be patient; it'll load eventually.

PDT, though, is about the single most useful tool I find for PHP development at work. The next front-runner is WinSCP, which has a really neat feature, Keep remote directory up to date:

This feature lets you have complete synchronization between a remote SFTP server and your local Eclipse workspace. It also supports private key encryption.

As a pair to WinSCP, I also use PuTTY, with anywhere from one to five sessions open at a time. PuTTY offers a neat tunnelling option, which I've mentioned before.

You can also access internal servers using one of these tunnels; for example, if I want to connect to a remote desktop session on host 192.168.1.101:3389 on my internal network, I'd use the following syntax:

Source port: 127.0.0.2:3389
Destination: 192.168.1.101:3389

Then, after establishing the SSH connection, using the 127.0.0.2 alias in Remote Desktop lets me connect to the machine behind the NAT traversal firewall.

Notepad++ is another program I highly recommend as a replacement for Notepad. If you can't use TextMate because you're not on a Mac, Notepad++ is an acceptable substitute. It offers some neat syntax highlighting features, and saves session history even when you exit.

Paint.NET is also a decent image editor, allowing you to verify hex values for colours and perform some minor tweaks to images without incurring the load time and aggravations in Photoshop.

Comments

Phil Downey on 2007-10-15 05:39 PM (#)

Bah, Eclipse. I can't be bothered to try PHP in this thing. As much as it'd probably be good, the designer in me still loves Dreamweaver.

I tried Notepad++ a while back, wasn't that impressed basically because I use notepad like a dropbox for notes I need to read and save em on my desktop. I never really bust open notepad to code.. Such an IDE whore.

As for Paint.NET, I agree - when I need something done quickly I too bust open the robust little app. Coming from a Photoshop whore, you should be impressed.

Dave Lahn on 2007-10-15 08:42 PM (#)

I've only ever really used TextMate for PHP programming.

Jake Billo on 2007-10-16 10:39 PM (#)

I don't think I'd ever do something more than a shell script in Notepad++, and by that point I'd probably break down and use vi. Notepad++ is more for my personal reference and random text files - I have a ton of documents on my desktop at work, too, and opening N++ opens them all up in tabs.

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