Setting up an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

As discussed earlier, the Moodle application consists of a great number of text scripts that can, in practice as well as theory, be edited with any simple text editor. However, you will be far better off using an integrated development environment for your development. An IDE will contain tools for code completion and code insight; for example, if you have forgotten the name of a class method, or if you need quick access to a function declaration, or the instances where a variable is used.

Perhaps more importantly, IDEs contain integrated debugging tools that allow you to step through the code as it runs (more on this later). The examples in this book use a special PHP version of the Eclipse IDE called Eclipse PDT, which can be downloaded from http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/.