Jommla development environment

[byronc]

Hi,
I am a java developer doing joomla sites on the side.

I am wanting to get into some more serious development within joomla and was wondering what is a good setup for developing.

ie what ide, what technolgies and any pther tups to get me going.

I have apache running on my machine and can run joomla sites on my machine although I tend to just work online, the slowness is starting to irritate me now.

Thanks in advance.
programming is life

[stutteringp0et]

I use Eclipse and Netbeans

[Pocketss]

Hi,
I am a java developer doing joomla sites on the side.

I am wanting to get into some more serious development within joomla and was wondering what is a good setup for developing.

ie what ide, what technolgies and any pther tups to get me going.

I have apache running on my machine and can run joomla sites on my machine although I tend to just work online, the slowness is starting to irritate me now.

Thanks in advance.
programming is life

Hey Bryonc.

Joomla Wiki - Setting up your workstation

Check out the wiki. It walks you through installing xampp and various other utilities. you can skip over parts of it that you already have configured.

You mentioned that you have apache already install, does that mean you also have mysql installed?

Regarding IDEs... I prefer Phpstorm, Netbeans, Esclipe. comes down to everyones' preference.

having a debugger which allows you to step through the source code is very helpful. I personally use zend debugger. I have used xdebug in the past and works just as well. Profilers are also helpful when trying to find bottlenecks.

The wiki has a lot of tips/tutorials that I have found to be extremely helpful.

Good Luck and remember, you can override anything and everything in J! so don't hack the core, just override. Will save you a lot of headaches!

Lastly, Work smarter not harder! if you can automate something, do so!

[byronc]

Hi Pockets, thanks for that.

What I would also like to know is how you develop locally and then get it to the webserver?

Surely we have something automated -working online is just TOO slow.

Regards
Byron

[fmmarzoa]

@byronc

That question is widely answered in this link previously pasted by Pocketss:

http://docs.joomla.org/Setting_up_your_ ... evelopment

So please, read it.

Regards,

[byronc]

Pockets. i don't think you answered my question? I wanted to know if there is any way to develop and auto release

[fmmarzoa]

You may follow the instructions written in that link:

http://docs.joomla.org/Setting_up_your_ ... evelopment

So you will have a webserver yet into your development workstation, without needing to copy your development to a remote host at every minnor change.

You may install subclipse for using subversion, as told also in that document, and create a subversion repository on your server, so among other advantages, when you need to release a new version to your production server, you will just need to do an svn checkout or update.

Another problem you may find is that as extensions in Joomla are divided in two parts -admin and site- it is difficult to deal with a subversion server with your project files split in two separate folders. The most popular solution for this issue seems to be using apache ant, so you can develop your extension having the admin and site parts together on an standalone folder, and copying them automatically to your development server -installed into your workstatin- on every change using ant.

There is a tutorial on this also here:
http://docs.joomla.org/Extension_develo ... he_project

I do not like this method very much, but to be honest I have not find yet a better way to do it.

I wrote something on the difficulties I found starting developing my own Joomla extensions here:
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=642&t=686644

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

[Pocketss]

Pockets. i don't think you answered my question? I wanted to know if there is any way to develop and auto release

Byronc, there are couple of things to consider when you are developing extensions for Joomla.

I prefer to develop in a sandbox site with nothing but sample data installed sometimes. Once you make sure your extension works well there, you take it to the site you are developing and make sure there aren't any bugs due to other extensions or modifications you have made to the system.

htdocs/sandbox/
htdocs/site/

I move from 1 to the other, and once I determine there are no bugs. I install the extension on the live site and configure it to work as I want.

there is no way to auto release. You can create phing scripts to copy the files from a sandbox site to a seperate folder. Then you can make a package, and then install that package. A phing script can do all but install the package.

Install / discover is important because if you make schema changes to the db, those will get processed appropriately if you put them in an sql file with the appropriate version number.

if you already have an extension install and you merely update the files, that works as well but some of the other things that are suppose to happen don't. Which you would have to do by hand. Updating the db manually is a pain. I prefer to just create an install package.

I hope that answers some of your questions. if you still have more let me know.

[Webdongle]

....
What I would also like to know is how you develop locally and then get it to the webserver?
....

As in creating a Joomla site then moving it to a remote host ?
http://docs.joomla.org/Copying_a_Joomla_website Akkeba is probably the best method.

[byronc]

....
What I would also like to know is how you develop locally and then get it to the webserver?
....

As in creating a Joomla site then moving it to a remote host ?
http://docs.joomla.org/Copying_a_Joomla_website Akkeba is probably the best method.

Yup, you got it. i just want to press a button and it all get replicated to my hosted server.

ie, work for an hour or three, finish task, auto upload to server - sql + static site(php/images etc), call client for run through.

working on line is just to slow.

i just cant believe there is no auto install.

[Webdongle]

i just cant believe there is no auto install

There is

• Akeeba creates a backup.jpa file which includes an auto installer
• The backup.jpa file is then placed on a server
• Akeeba have a free program called Kickstart and it is used to unpack the backup.jpa file
• Once the files are unpacked then the auto installer runs. You then install your site and enter the database details for the database you created on the new server

[byronc]

i just cant believe there is no auto install

There is

• Akeeba creates a backup.jpa file which includes an auto installer
• The backup.jpa file is then placed on a server
• Akeeba have a free program called Kickstart and it is used to unpack the backup.jpa file
• Once the files are unpacked then the auto installer runs. You then install your site and enter the database details for the database you created on the new server

and i need to do this every three hours (for example?)

[byronc]

i just cant believe there is no auto install

There is

• Akeeba creates a backup.jpa file which includes an auto installer
• The backup.jpa file is then placed on a server
• Akeeba have a free program called Kickstart and it is used to unpack the backup.jpa file
• Once the files are unpacked then the auto installer runs. You then install your site and enter the database details for the database you created on the new server

and i need to do this every three hours (for example?)

i know about akeeba, thats not really auto install. there is still a lot of stuf to work throough when you run the kickstart etc.

really, what i am asking os to develop - refresh to web, developer locally somemore and then refresh to the web