Some important links

• Drupal Hooks for Eclipse PDT (- maintainer: deekayen): http://drupal.org/project/eclipse
• Creating your own Eclipse Templates - by Jur de Vries: http://www.triquanta.nl/blog/creating-eclipse-templates
• Debugging Drupal with Xdebug - by Pieter De Clercq: http://krimson.be/articles/debugging-drupal-6-using-xdebug

Slides

Find slides attached as pdf below.
In the coming days some more in depth articles will be added as pdf files until they can be ported to signedesign.com.

Introduction

Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar are not the end all of Front end development tools. Likewise, to do serious Drupal development you need a proper IDE for PHP.

Wouldn’t it be great if you and your team could go beyond PHP and do all of your Drupal development in an IDE that is fast and reliable and cross platform? Fortunately two such IDE’s exist and are available for free: Oracle Netbeans (for now at least) and Eclipse.

At first glance Eclipse may seem a bit hard to configure. It has even been said to be slow. This presentation aims to correct these notions.
Pieter de Clercq (The Pickwick Project), Jur de Vries (Triquanta) and Willem Mol (Signedesign) will show you just how easy it is to tweak Eclipse for Drupal and integrate it with your workflow. We will show the performance gains that have been made with the advent of Eclipse Helios, PDT 2.2 and Aptana Studio 2.0.5 and how to speed things up even further. On top of that we will show you as much of Eclipse’s richness as we can possibly cram into 45 minutes.

This session assumes knowledge of PHP and Drupal. Some awareness of jQuery, CSS and HTML is preferable but not required. Please save all your questions for the end of the session or tweet them during the session with the #dddeclipse hash tag.

By presenting you with the often overlooked first step of a solid Drupal development environment this session complements many others:

• Simpletests: sleep better at night
• An Introduction to git
• I can haz jQueries?
• JQuery in Drupal? Oh yes...

Session overview

Introduction

1 Tweaking Eclipse for Drupal Development
We briefly discuss requirements and installation including plugins, among which of course are Aptana and PDT.
We demonstrate working with perspectives and editors and show you how to add the proper editor to your files.
We go into the setup of all the Drupal specifics (line-endings, spaces for tabs, utf-8, formatting and so on.
We debunk the performance issues myth and focus on validation settings, a lean workspace and some solutions specific to Windows installations.
We also briefly touch on version control with Drupal's git and cvs and show you how to connect with your Drupal server.

2 PHP
We discuss creating and importing a PHP project as well as enabling PHP and javascript on an existing projects.
We also focus on integrating xdebug for our demo later on.
Be ready for the good stuff when we demo PHP templates and working with the Drupal hooks in Eclipse.

Interlude: tips & tricks
keyboard shortcuts

3 Debugging Drupal in Eclipse
If you've previously done Drupal development, you are aware of api.drupal.org. We show you how to get to all api documentation within Eclipse.
Be sure to stay sharp for our step debugging demo with xdebug. You will learn how to see debugging information, real-time. No more manual print_r() and debug_backtrace() statements.

Be sure to go to Troubleshooting and debugging for more information on this topic.

Interlude: tips & tricks
wordwrap, switching code styles, handling preferences

4 Front end integration
We show you how to set up Firefox in Aptana Studio.
We also go into jQuery and will touch on working with JSLint and JsTestDriver.

5 HTML & CSS
HTML5 is an area where Aptana is still lacking. We show you how to set your own HTML5 template as standard and appease the validators.
Closely related is setting up and using snippets to speed up you output.
We close off with zencoding, which has become a lot easier to implement. We will demo zencoding for HTML and CSS and show you some of its Bumblebee level awesome Transformer power.

Speakers

Jur de Vries has a background in Java and knows just about everything there is to know about setting up and programming for Drupal with Eclipse and PDT. Even knowledgeable users may come away from this session pleasantly surprised.
Pieter De Clercq has been using Xdebug with Aptana successfully for over a year now. He will provide the necessary knowledge and pointers on step debugging to enrich this session for even the most hardcore Drupal developer.
Willem Mol has been using Eclipse with Aptana for front-end development since Eclipse Ganymede. He will focus on HTML, CSS and jQuery-integration.