Constituents of a PHP based Open source Web Development Environment
There are a whole bunch of systems that are involved in setting up development environments, some of them range from issue trackers to version control systems and even text editors. Everyone has some preference, choice and a point-of view about things, and so do I. Here is my list of essential systems and software from a good open source web development environment. I have classified my list into multiple categories
Collaboration Tools
- Issue Tracking : Bugzilla
- Project Management: MediaWiki
- Version Control: Subversion
- Version Control Web GUI: Sventon
Bugzilla is by far the coolest bug tracking system I have ever seen in the opensource market. I like bugzilla because of its simplistic approach to bug tracking. It gives what you need in a simple user interface and its easy to configure and integrate.
You should call me nuts for calling MediaWiki a project management software. Yet if you ask me about project management, i would say mediawiki does the job. Project Management primarily for micro-development teams is about collaboration, information sharing in a semi organized way. Of all the tools that i evaluated for project management, if found media wiki to be only one perfectly doing the job.
Subversion is a class apart; it was chosen as the version control system without even evaluation. Its really quick, easily manageable, has certainly good reliability and access controls.
There are a lot of good (better) subversion WebGUIs available for subversion, but I choose this one because this was free, and it gave me what I needed.
Development Environment
- Windows Environments
- Web Server : Apache (or) IIS
- IDE: Eclipse (or) Zend Studio, Dreamweaver**
- TortoiseSVN - the ultimate choice
- Windows Stack: XAMPP
- Linux Environments
- Web Server : Apache
- IDE: Eclipse/PDT (or) Zend Studio
- KDE SVN Client or Some SVN Client
- Database: MySQL
- Eclipse Plugins
- PDT for Eclipse
- Subclipse for Eclipse
- Takstop for Eclipse integrated with Bugzilla works a as a great issue tracking client.
Zend Studio is a must have if you are a php developer, zend studio comes with a whole lot of features and tools that help in increasing the efficiency of php development.
** Dreamweaver is not an open source software; there are practically no opensource tools to match Dreamweaver in Web designing IDE’s.
