Back to Enterprise Apps

It's been quite sometime that I worked with Eclipse and developed RCP apps and Plug-ins leveraging several *highly* interesting Eclipse projects. The more I work with Eclipse more it attracts.

But the time had it and I've to move back with traditional Enterprise Application stuff. I tried hard to be in Eco-system, but I guess I was out of luck. If you ever happen to be JEE developer you know how different feeling it is to code for Eclipse. Eclipse is fun :), Now, that I agree with chris on his views about web development, It's time for a conformity rant: Web application development sucks big time. Ok, I'm done.

Now that I'm back into the Enterprise app. dev. environment where, apparently, I'll wait months and months for Web Logic (or WebSphere w/e. all of them are bad) to start and deploy large-large application with more and more of ugly XML configs than Java code. I would have open war with the BA on requirements that don't make sense. I can't guess what else will happen with me, I've been the part of this nightmare before and It's coming back.

Oh Eclipse, I'm missing you already :(.

Essential Features for Eclipse PDT

Eclipse PDT project initiative is a good news for PHP developers. However, there are few basic features, which are expected of any web development tooling, still missing. It is good to know that the project is focused on serious features on unit testing, debug infrastructure, editors etc. You can vote for the essential feature enhancement on project page.

I would like to share some PDT uses from a developer perspective. I use PDT for editing and source code management. These features are good enough, and will be more productive eventually.

However I felt lack of support for deployment features, all you get is external tools for local apache and basic page browsing. But Every time I modify a web page, I've to do rcp or use WinSCP to deploy that file back to the server and refresh page. Also, most of the times, It's essential to be connected with server on SSH connection to do regular fancy server stuff. WinSCP, although a great tool, isn't really "ergonomic excellence" and hence this tool switching becomes a painful activity.

It seems PDT is assuming that developers work only on development/staging machine and hence the lack of support for deployed web applications. Also based on my experience, I found PHP deployment to be very very different, fairly simple to be ridiculously near non-existence, compared to other "heavy-weight" web environment. Java, for example, has lots of "things" and steps to deploy a web app, but that's a different story...

I strongly recommend consideration for following features:

1. Built in SSH command interface (remote terminal as console view ).
2. Support for auto upload, or built in rcp (rsync builder - rsync as a part of auto-build would be a great feature!). Alternatively, this can be like MS Visual Studio style interface through HTTP interface, using HTTP methods (PUT etc.). Live Deployment feature is *essential*.

These basic features, not specific to only PHP IDE, can substantially increase productivity.
I'll post more uses of PDT as I go along using it.