[pdt-dev] Locale Package Development with PDT and Composer

[Thomas Gossmann <eclipse@xxxxxx>]

Hey guys,

I've been on a mission for this, since I created the composer eclipse 
plugin with Robert - well, JDT inspired me.

First, let me introduce what I mean by locale package development: 
Nowadays, php devs create package and not seldom multiples of them that 
often depend on each other. If you have an update ready, you need to 
roundtrip packagist, which is around ~3 coffee for each update ;) I 
tried to avoid the packagist roundtrip and created a plugin to simply 
symlink and read package descriptions from where they are on the local 
HDD [1] (The plugin is more of a research project with the intention of 
contributing this back into composer itself). You can read more about 
composer local development at [2].

Now, the job of any IDE would be to help with that.

1) Regardless of composer being used or not, PDT should support taking 
other projects into its build path [3]. Now, with composer installed, it 
would realize, that one of the packages under vendor/ is symlinked and 
is also a project present in the current workspace. It would add this 
project into the build path instead of the paths found in composer 
autoload. (Since this issue is discussed right now, I'd like to share 
that background on this).

2) Follow symlinks on cmd/ctrl+click: Since composer automatically marks 
a vendor/ dir as derieved, there is a warning when one tries to change a 
file there, which is correct. If sb cmd/ctrl+clicks on something and the 
if the target of that is symlinked and the original files are a project 
under the current workspace, the original file can be opened instead, 
see [4] and [5].


Would like to hear your comments.

gossi

[1] https://github.com/gossi/composer-localdev-plugin
[2] http://gos.si/blog/composer-development-with-local-dependencies
[3] http://eclip.se/444226
[4] http://eclip.se/492188
[5] http://eclip.se/492187