After downloading and installing the full version of the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools), I was ready to start using Eclipse in my SimplyMEPIS (basically Ubuntu) distro to edit PHP code. To my surprise, the PHP perspective was not working. Eclipse seemed to recognize that it was installed, but wouldn’t utilize it. Starting Eclipse with the “-clean” option didn’t make any difference (except that the GUI looked slightly different). I found out that PDT requires Java 5 (or higher). I already had Java 6 installed, but it wasn’t being used. Java 4.2 was still being used. I tracked down the symbolic link for the “java” command, renamed it (in case I messed up and needed it back), and created a new symbolic link to my Java 6 java command. I checked the Java version with “java -version” which verified it was now using Java 6. When I fired up Eclipse it now is able to utilize the PDT.

An interesting side note…when PDT wasn’t working, Eclipse was defaulting to using KWrite as the (external) editor for PHP files. I was impressed with KWrite’s built-in syntax highlighting and code folding capabilities. I will definitely keep KWrite in mind when I need to make a quick change to a PHP file.

Visit http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/ for more information about the Eclipse PDT project.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Eclipse, PHP, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.