Digital Base - Blog » tools

Symfony Plugin for Eclipse : SfDT

Gijs Nelissen — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:27:25 +0000

I just found out someone is working on a new symfony plugin for eclipse, there used to be symfoclipse, but closed-source, commercial and no support for Eclipse 3.4. This new plugin works with symfony 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. The website states it is tested with Eclipse 3.3.2 and PDT 1.0.2 but i did manage to run it on Eclipse 3.4 and PDT 2.x.

So what can this plugin do ?

create modules/projects/applications rightfrom within Eclipse
convert Clay database to schema.xml/yml
run symfony commandline from within eclipse

More information on this plugin :

website : http://sfdt.borox.ch/
google discussion / another google discussion

Good job guys !

good linux mkdir usage

Gijs Nelissen — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:00:00 +0000

Most people only know mkdir the simple way. The simple way being
[code]mkdir-simple[/code]
I will give you some tips howto use mkdir, the “advanced” way.
All of the above commands could be done in a single command.
[code]mkdir-advanced[/code]
It is alot easier to use the -p option with mkdir, and make all subdirectories with a single command. Even after you read this post, you will catch yourself using the ‘cd’ way…
try to avoid that, it will save you alot of time.

My Favourite Design Tools

Gijs Nelissen — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:48:40 +0000

As a professional web developer i tried alot of software, this results in a great deal of expertise & experience with the most common design tools. In this post i will list the software i am currently using to create our websites.

First of all, all the developers at Digital Base work in a linux environment. All of our workstations are running an 64bit build of Ubunty Gutsy 7.10. So if you are hoping for a listing of windows software, you could stop right here, although some of the tools we are using have a windows version.

Because we all (or at least most of us, *wink* @ Jan) like "eye-candy", we are using Compiz Fusion on a Gnome Window Manager. The advantage of this package, besides having a kickass desktop environment, is you can set shortcut keys & customise almost every aspect of your user interface (maximise toggle buttons, window positioning etc..).

We develop all our websites on a LAMP platform (LAMP : Linux Apache MySQL PHP), it speaks for itself these packages are installed on all workstations for local development & debugging purposes. As for the programming we are still using Zend Studio 5.51 (the linux binary), this very nice (but never updated) IDE gives you the needed functions like :

code completion
syntax highlighting
debugging capabilities
code assist
source/code templates

At this moment Zend is switching their IDE to an Eclipse based IDE (codename Zend Neon ), we did try it, but back then it wasn't stable enough for us to start using it. Although i am currently testing Eclipse PDT & Zend Neon, most of us still use the Zend IDE as it is rocksteady, responsive.

Next to that we're using the popular webbrowser Firefox with a few interesting developer plugins like Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug. To test the applications in IE webbrowsers we use an RDP connection to a virtual machine or Windows Server, or use the IE4Linux binaries to check/improve how a website looks when rendered by the IE engine.

So there you have a basic insight how we do things, i'll make sure to complete this list as we're using alot more tools, but my time is limited