Useful Thoughts and Actions Taken

How to use XAMPP with Eclipse IDE

Research Link and notes

• Eclipse PHPEclipse Drupal Setup – the IBM version   – is old.  Better to use XAMPP  install as it has everything and appears PHPEclipse already assumes its usage although it can be altered to use custom installs of Apache / MySQL / PHP – This article stops short in that it does not tell you how to run from within Eclipse.  Maybe that is because it does not instruct on how to install a debugger. ( not sure )
• PHPEclipse Setup   – do not check the "install as service" checkbox when installing XAMPP  or you will not be able to start Apache from the XAMPP control panel
• Test your XAMPP install by clicking on this link:  localhost/xampp/index.php
• Now the plugin should be sucessfully installed. Now we have to make it tie into XAMPP.
• Point XAMPP at your workspace – edit apache httpd.conf  file. Default workspace location is \xampp\htdocs – All projects must be defined in the workspace directory so that PHP files can be found by the Apache Web Server. You cannot create PHP projects in other parts of the file system.
• To test the http document index.html dial in  http://localhost/index.html
• Set  mysql root password and phpMyAdmin password using this http://localhost/security/xamppsecurity.php
• Set up drupal so the install program can be run:  Set up the $db_url and $base_url in the setup file
• You should be able to run a version of your install on localhost now:  http://localhost/YourWebSiteDirectory     … it will default to index.php in that directory.  You should run and verify operation
• Next the Eclipse IDE needs to be set up so it can run the index.php script of the drupal install.  See this Example for running PHP script   … it is the german install but it is similar enough to see what to do.  You need to point to the index.php file with the argument should point to the index.php file and include the directory path to it.   At this point I observed that I could run and observe the text output of the php file run in the console tab.

Debugger :  XDebug activition

SUMMARY:  XDebug instructions in the xdebug.txt file packaged with XAMPP reads as follows:

1: Activate XDEBUG in apache\bin\php.ini
2: Comment out ZEND (only one zend_extension_ts is going)
3: Start PHP Scripts with session param ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=<name>
e.g.: http://localhost/xampp/phpinfo.php?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=mydebug
4: Start xampp\php\debugclient-x.y.z.exe     ( x.y.z being the appropriate version shipped with your XAMPP install )

More Detailed

You should have already saved the Xdebug extension DLL file to your PHP extension folder.  Record down the full path of it. Now, open up your php.ini file and go down to the [XDebug] section, or create it if it’s not there. Uncomment or add the following lines:

;; Only Zend OR (!) XDebug
zend_extension_ts="D:\XAMPP\php\ext\php_xdebug.dll"
xdebug.remote_enable=On
xdebug.remote_host="localhost"
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp

…………more

1. When you get the Windows update nag either in Windows Vista or Windows XP, open the command prompt by using the path StartMenu>Run>cmd or windows key + r and type cmd and then press enter.

2. In the windows command prompt now type the below mentioned code:

sc stop wuauserv

3. Once you have put the above mentioned code and press enter and the windows service would be stopped and the nag screen will disappear. Windows update service will get restarted once you restart your computer hence you need not worry as your computer will keep receiving updates.

That’s it so now you can disable the Windows update restart nag whenever you are into something important.