Page 1 of 2
What do you use:?:
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 10:58 am
by Hemeleen
Hi

,
just a question from somebody who doesn’t know a whole lot of PHP and doesn’t need to know a lot, I know…… this you can’t imagine

I am responsible for organising the website and the automation of the foundation I work for…

I encountered a difference of opinion among the people doing the job….
The one swears by using notepad and typing the stuff himself , and the other wants to use a editor with all kind of extra benefits like syntax highlighting….

what do you prefer to use to program with? notepad or some kind of editor?
If you use a different program language I’d like to know too..

And do you split the PHP (or other language) as much as possible into different pages or exact the opposite?
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 11:27 am
by JPlush76
Ask him this...
if he was building a house, would he use a stick to pound a nail in the roof or would he use a hammer?
Editors are tools, tools improve efficiency. Note pad is fine for little changes and learning, etc.. but once you get to higher level programming it becomes just a tool in a box of many.
Re: What do you use:?:
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 11:40 am
by redhair
Hemeleen wrote:
And do you split the PHP (or other language) as much as possible into different pages or exact the opposite?
You mean formfields beeing posted to another (php) page.
I usually use one page...so dont post form values to a new php page, but the very same page the form was at (using $PHP_SELF in the form action). This reduces the amount of files needed to accomplish the same thing.
Benefits:
Pages are easier maintable.
Lesser files on the server.
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 12:15 pm
by McGruff
I'd be lost without syntax highlighting. IMO it's practically essential - makes debugging code MUCH easier.
A single script can start off in one file and then include any number of other php files.
With a big project, it definitely helps to "modularise" code. As an example, you might have an "includes" folder with a config.php which stores various settings (db user name eg) and a common.php which stores various commonly used, user-defined utility functions. These would be included in all scripts.
A large site might have different "modules", with various scripts in module folders. Say you have a forum module: in the "forum" folder you might have different files for different tasks like viewing a topic or posting a message. Perhaps you'll also have some classes etc which are shared between different forum tasks - these will be in separate files which you can include where needed to avoid duplicating code. If they are used in other modules as well as the forum, they'd maybe go into the "includes" folder.
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 12:16 pm
by JPlush76
McGruff wrote:I'd be lost without syntax highlighting. IMO it's practically essential - makes debugging code MUCH easier.
I agree 110%
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 5:27 pm
by m3rajk
i learned programming langs first. php is a scripting lang. the first time i programmed it was on a windows based machine and i used notepad. i never used a programming editor before. now i swear by xemacs.
notepad has a limitaton on charactgers per line. programming editors don't.
programming eeditors have an exceptionally helpful thing called syntax highlighting. this helps you figure out if you're using something built in.
programming editors have another extremely helpful tool: parenthesis matching.
try scheme once in notepad. once in a programming editor. and something a bit higher level than "ehllo world"
after that you'll only touch notepad for quick mods when you don't have a programming editot handy. trust me on that.
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 7:02 pm
by redhair
I use
Edit +
Syntax Highlighting is, as mentioned before, something really usefull.
Look at
this feature list what an editor like edit + can do above that feature.
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 7:09 pm
by cactus
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 7:42 pm
by Hemeleen
Thx

its clear to me that few people only use notepad....
about using the "$PHP_SELF in the form action"
are there reasons not to make one big php action going on?

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 8:56 pm
by macewan
vi used to be my fav* but now i just use something like gedit or beaver (beaver-project.org) because of the ability to use tabbed edits.
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 10:19 pm
by m3rajk
mace, have you used xemacs? it has that, syntax highlighting, parenthesis matching, and you can (at least on a posix compliant system) choose to have the gcc utelyzed by it, or other compilers, as well as a debugger (if you ike them, personally i don't). emacs and xemacs are far and away the best two i have used. both are rather small in the most basic install but are rather powerful if you have the goodies that they can have
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 10:21 pm
by DuFF
I used to use pure notepad for my pure HTML pages but when I started PHP I realized it would be much easier to use an editor. Right now I'm using Winsyntax which isn't bad. Could anyone suggest a good (and free

) editor that I could try out, I'm looking to find one that has a couple more features in it.
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2003 10:35 pm
by m3rajk
http://www.xemacs.org
xemacs: free. opensource. has more languages than i know. does syntax highlighting. does parenthesis matching.
more info there. it's my personal favorite.
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2003 11:35 pm
by macewan
never got into using emacs too much. mostly just vi. lately beaver is my editor of choice.
testing bluefish some this evening though. =) thanks for the links to xemacs anyway.
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2003 11:46 pm
by m3mn0n
Dreamweaver MX over here!