Posted by Mike Russell on 03/05/07 03:26

"David Smithz" <dave1900@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:ByKGh.12878$I46.574@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk...
>
> Thanks for the input Mike and Steve.
>
> I tried out the VS one Steve suggested and was excited by the Visual
> Studio interface (although I've not used one since VB6, but it looks the
> same but better).
>
> However, I did not seem to be able to find a view which showed my HTML
> llike in the same way dreamweaver does. I do find this very useful and
> would not want to sacrafise it.

About all you can do is open it in a browser. I don't believe there is
anything like DW's design view, and I plan to continue using DW for page
layout, and Eclipse for the php development.

> I like the sound of your suggestions Mike. Does eclipse have the HTML
> design view like Dreamweaver

No - everything is code view.

> (I have just installed the trial for Dreamweaver 8 and do say the code
> editing looks much better - but there are many bad reviews about the
> product generally).

It's the tool people love to hate - better than FrontPage, and there's not
much else out there. I skipped from DW 3 to DW 8, so can't really compare
the code and design view functinality with DW7. It crashes once an hour or
so - irritating but not fatal. It works well for designing web pages and
assigning actions to form items, hotspots, etc. The file access -
synchronizing to the server, etc, is klunky. Often the synchronization
command decides to simply update all of my files (1000's of them!) and
usually fumbles the ball in the process, requirng me to start over and nurse
it along. DW3 was the same, maybe a little worse.

> As I don't know what XDebug I guess I don't use it. But maybe it is
> something I should be using.

XDebug is a php debugger that can runs as an extension to php. It be used
remotely (provided you have admin control over the php on that system, or
on your local system, using php.exe. XDebug comes with a simple command
line debug client that allows you to set breakpoints, examining variables,
stack trace, etc. Most of the PHP IDE's I mentioned connect to XDebug. I
find it very useful as a learning tool - for example you can open up the
$_SERVER array and see what's there, watch strings being parsed. All that
good stuff.
--
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/

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