Sandy Smith

[Cross-posted from the Forum One Tech Blog]

I recently upgraded Eclipse PDT to the most recent version, and I decided to figure out something that had been bugging me: why couldn’t Eclipse use a project I’d already checked out via the command line to the same workspace?

A colleague suggested that I could indeed do it, and that I just needed to start a new project but check “Create project from existing source.” This does work, but it has a couple of restrictions that explain why I was having so many problems and why it’s kind of useless for me.

1. Projects from existing sources cannot be in your workspace. I have no idea why this restriction exists. I could understand why starting a project inside another project would be bad, but all Eclipse has to do is add a couple of extra files to a directory. Nonetheless, all the sites I’d set up in my workspace and had been using other text editors to edit were unusable. Coda, by contrast, will happily take over an existing project, no matter where it is or what is in it. Interestingly, you can set up a workspace inside another workspace, so I could get around this by creating another workspace that pointed to a subfolder of my current workspace that contained the source code I wanted to use.
2. If using subversion, Subclipse will not be able to work with your checked out copy if the versioned files are in a subdirectory of your project. This is also strange to me. In Drupal, for example, we only version the sites/all directory and use Drush to update the main application. In other projects, we have versioned code outside the public root and create the public root from a tarball we keep in the repository. Since these files have configurations that shouldn’t be versioned, I want to be able to edit them in Eclipse while using Subclipse to control the versioned part. Sadly, this restriction means I can’t do that.

So my workflow is still to create subdirectories, including a public root, in my workspace by hand, and then importing the project from Subversion with Eclipse’s Import function. These seem like pointless restrictions to me. If anybody knows a workaround, I’d be grateful.

Thought I’d give a few overall impressions from CodeWorks DC while they’re fresh in my mind.

The community

What really impressed me was just how great the PHP community is. There were some Big Names there, but everybody was really approachable and happy to share what they knew and ready to listen to others. They were really friendly, and I had some great conversations in the hall and after hours, both with other attendees and with speakers and staff. Get a sense of this over at Dawn Casey’s blog.

The tutorials

I had expected the tutorials to be somewhat interesting, but otherwise expected the meat to be on the second day with the more traditional talks.

Wrong.

The code review I attended in the morning was very educational, and Keith Casey was quite sporting about letting his project be dissected by ze Germans, as they came to be known. Best line: “Well, think of how many people are in this room, multiply it by our billing rate, and see how much it cost us just to figure out what the hell this piece of code does.” But the Advanced OO Design talk was really valuable. The lower crowd size coupled with the length of the presentation made it very easy to ask substantive questions and get serious responses. It helped me get over a number of mental blocks I’d been having with the implementation of MVC in web apps and better ways to do Dependency Injection.

None of this takes away from the second day’s talks. I’ll highlight some of them in coming blog posts. But the tutorials were an unexpected gem.

Microsoft

Microsoft appears to be making a really big effort to reach out to the PHP community, and I appreciate it. They were a big sponsor of the event, including an open bar the second night. I also appreciate what they’ve been doing to improve PHP’s performance on IIS. I hope they follow this effort up by taking steps to make themselves really interoperable with other systems, so it doesn’t feel like going Microsoft is an all-or-nothing choice.

The Organizers

Even though it was small enough to handle informally, CodeWorks felt very well-run. Despite a truly grueling schedule (two teams leapfrogging across the country, one day on, one day off), everybody seemed in good spirits and there was comparatively little confusion. When a mixup or a technical glitch occurred, they were able to adapt quickly, even ready to get a speaker to throw in an extra talk.

If they decide to to this again, I highly recommend this conference. If they’re in town again, I’m going to lobby to get the whole Forum One team there–it was really that good.