Help setting up php for Eclipse

Question

I\'m trying to set up Eclipse for php web development. What I would like to do is preview a php web page from within Eclipse, but I cannot figure out how to do this. Is there

Answer 1

I setup apache/php/MySQL on my windows PC, so that testing environment is not totally unlike my servers (excepting the OS, but 90% of the time that's okay). I create alias's in the Apache configuration to the Eclipse workspace, and just hop between the browser and eclipse. The URL for testing is something like:

http://localhost/project_name/file.php

While this isn't ideal, it is a fairly consistent/smooth process that doesn't require a great deal of configuration within Eclipse. I keep thinking there should be a better way, but I honestly don't think I'm burning enough time to justify the research. Once the setup is done, I don't really loose more time after that, and I can control which version of PHP I'm running on my system.

I don't tend to like integrated browsers for testing of web applications anyway. Every time I've dealt with one, it was completely different from a "real" browser that I had to completely retest anyway. At least this way, I have my Firefox testing done when I'm through the first pass of the logic.