My purpose in this column is to introduce you to FirePHP, the problem it solves, and how it is intended to work within your application for maximum benefit. I will present some useful high-level knowledge to make it easier for you to integrate FirePHP into your application.

This is not a step-by-step tutorial. I have made a complete demo available for download, along with some useful libraries illustrating all the concepts covered here. I want to emphasize that the demo is only one possible implementation. There are many other possibilities.

Continue Reading »

Integrated Development Environments in general and Eclipse/Aptana Studio specifically provide tree-based project explorers used to locate and launch files by displaying the file system that contains your project code. Typically the simple directory and file tree is marked up with:

• Icons for different file extensions
• Version information about the directories and files if connected to a version control system
• Context menus specific to each directory and file

This widely accepted approach to represent code files in a project has worked well in the past because projects and project components were typically:

Continue Reading »