Please join the developer's mailing list (phpeclipse-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, see instructions on http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpeclipse).
Development tools
The mainstream should currently be Java SDK 1.4 and Eclipse 3.0 with the Java Development Tools (JDT) and Plugin Development Environment (PDE). Moving forward we will need to start working with the Java SDK 1.5, as well as Eclipse 3.1.
Install PHPeclipse and the dependencies (including Quantum DB and Eclipse Tidy) by downloading from the update site at
(Note that it's problematic to work directly against the Quantum DB and Eclipse Tidy CVS repositories, because they don't have tags for their latest releases.)
If you are sure you are only going to do plug-in development (i.e. work on PHPeclipse source code, not any PHP code) using this Eclipse installation, then don't install PHPeclipse using the update site. Just install Quantum DB.
Downloading PHPeclipse source from SVN
First get a team project set:
svn co http://svn.phpeclipse.com/phpeclipse/trunk/build/phpeclipse-projectset_1.2.x.psf
Or the equivalent using the Eclipse SVN repository perspective. You can also download it from dev.phpeclipse.com
Then check out the plug-ins by importing the team project set into Eclipse
(In Eclipse) File -> Import -> Team Project Set -> Browse...
Locate the .psf file you just checked out from SVN.
Note that the phpeclipse-projectset_1.2.x.psf team project set uses anonymous SVN access. If you want to commit to the repository all you need is an account that can commit code. You can talk to one of the active developers to request that access.
Building the plug-ins
Auto-build should work without errors. Please send a message to the - devel list if following this process results in build errors!
There is a more complicated procedure for building the feature using the Ant build scripts, but that's really only necessary if you're preparing a new release.
[one tip - if you have classpath errors for a plugin, make sure you right click on the project, select PDE tools and update the classpath of these plugins. You can see the .classpath file in the resources perspective in the plugins main directory]
For more background information please read the articles:
- PDE Does Plug-ins which shows the creation of a simple HelloWorld plugin
- Build and Test Automation for Plug-ins and Features
Running the plug-ins
Select Run -> Run As -> Eclipse Application or Debug -> Debug As -> Eclipse Application if you want to run the run-time workbench under the Eclipse Java debugger, which is most likely more useful.
Contributing code
Use the Eclipse Team functionality to create patches and then send the patches as text attachments in email to phpeclipse-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. Many small patches are better than fewer, larger patches that fix a single bug or contribute a single feature are better than multi-purpose patches. Expect to move on to direct CVS access after sending in a few good patches - we'd like to grow the active dev team.
Right mouse click on a file, folder or project node in the Navigator view and select menu: Team->Create Patch....
For general background information of the eclipse framework, please see this list of articles: http://eclipse.org/articles/index.html.
Using Eclipse 3.1
I got this email describing how to get PHPEclipse development going, I use Eclipse 3.1 and Java 1.5.0 and it seems to work well so far:
As a minimal checkout to start with SVN you can use these modules
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.core
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.feature
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.debug.core
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.debug.ui
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.externaltools
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.launching
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.phphelp
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.ui
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.webbrowser
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.xml.core
- net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.xml.ui
What I'm doing is, if I create a new (minimal installation) build, I update the version numbers in the associate plugin.xml files. I also update the (multiple) version numbers in
net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.feature.core/feature.xml
(if you like you can delete some of the unnecessary modules in this file for a "minimal" build) (edit: I never ended up using the package net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.feature.core, I always stuck with net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.feature)
After that I select every plugin.xml (edit: not all at once, do one at a time) and press "right mouse button" in the Package Explorer view and choose menu:
PDE Tools->Create Ant Build File
Same for net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.feature/feature.xml: Press "right mouse button" in the Package Explorer view and choose menu:
PDE Tools->Create Ant Build File
Then select the
net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.feature/build.xml
and choose menu:
Run->Ant Build....
I choose the following "Target executionorder":
clean, build.jars, build.sources, zip.sources, zip.distribution, refresh
and press the "Run" button.
After a while the 2 new distribution packages are available in the
net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.feature
folder.
There are other possibilities to create a deployable plugin described in the article Build and Test Automation for plug-ins and features
[[Category:PHPEclipse Plugin]] [[Category:Developing PHPEclipse]]
