Flex Builder, PDT, VMware = AMFPHP hotness
I am going to Kauai for a week and of course I had to have everything work without an internet connection. I also am about a month behind on some stuff for The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development book so I figure a beach, mojito, and a laptop can get a lot done. I installed VMWare Server on my laptop and got a copy of Gentoo PHP Web Development Appliance for VMware. Mapped my eclipse work space to the samba share of the home directory of the web servers document root and now I have Flex Builder 3 and PDT to do development against a real linux server. In the one hour I have this configured I have realized that I have probably wasted at least a month of my life dragging files out of my workspace and uploading them to a development server. Now I have a local debugger, code complete, svn, and all the other goodness eclipse offers for AS3 and PHP and if at any time I want to see what it is going to look like on the server I just refresh my browser which is pointing at the virtual server. If anyone else spends the majority of there switching between client server development get this setup going. You will never know how you lived without it. Let me know if you need help! Change makes the world a better place.
Why use an os emulator to run apache/php?
I couldn’t agree more. I split my projects up using virtual hosts, creating separate mySQL users and separate projects in Zend and recently flex. Having a project space that is also a working web server makes for a nice environment particularly debugging on the server.
can’t beat apache on linux thats why (plus you could probably emulate a very good clone of your live server)… nice post dude, one of the biggest time wasters on any project could be your workflow, and sorting it out from the very begginging is key to the success of many projects…
enjoy hawaii, looking forward to your forthcoming book.
up
Actually I have a snapshot of the exact production server environment that we use so I was able to take with me the database and everything else! Our production servers run on VMware enterprise with HA and VMotion.
Thanks for this. I’m a newbie to programming using Eclipse PDT for OSX. Went and spent the money on ZendStudio and now think I’m regretting it. I’d LOVE to get PHP w/debug, and also Flex SDK (or use my wasted Zend money on buying Flex Builder for Eclipse. I can hardly stand that finally all these dev apps are in one place! Would love help/pointers/advice on getting this rolling with OSX.
Thanks!
Joel.
if you own Eclipse PDT you can also use it as a plugin just like you can use flex builder as a plugin.
You need to install eclipse by itself and then add the plugin version rather than the all in one solution.
Anyone seen an AMFPHP LAMP virtual setup for vmware?
Thanks,
Travis
Wade,
How do you configure pdt to debug your amfphp services?
Normally, I just test functions by running through the amfphp browser, and logging the variables to a text file as the function runs. What a pain.
I’ve got pdt with xdebug (or zend) installed just fine, but as far as I can see, this only allows me to debug php scripts that I execute in debug mode from eclipse.
I’d like to be able to set a breakpoint in a function, and when its called from the amfphp browser, halt execution and allow me step through it line by line. Is this even possible?
@Jon
Jon,
This is the exact question I have. Have you found an answer yet? I’d like to set a breakpoint in my web service then use the amfphp browser to cause the breakpoint to be hit.