Development Tools

My Windows Development Environment

As a pretty avid Mac / Linux user, I get stuck in my ways. However, every once in a while I get an itch to do something different, just so I can see how those that I'm teaching are affected by some of the changes that I make. This includes the realm of the Windows PHP Developer. With that said I thought it handy to go about sharing some of the tools that I use to develop with to make my Windows environment more like the environments I'm used to.

Use Drush to Test Update Hooks

So I've always been a big fan of using drush for debugging. You can see a little bit about it in Finding an exiting Page's Callback Function in Drupal. I find that some of the most annoying bits of testing what I'm doing comes when I'm dealing with Update Hooks. Check out what I do down below using drush to do my testing.

Development Using Unison on Windows

I've been plagued by the fact that at work I do my development on a remote system. This generally isn't a problem except on the rare occasion I want to use a debugger, since I'm a Vim user. However, when that time comes (and it always does), I have to sit there and wait while eclipse "builds" my project. Nothing irritates me more than "Hurry up and wait". Since I started working with Drupal, I've found this to be a very common theme. It's far from the speed that I got out of Zend Framework, or other MVC based frameworks, but it does so much for you.