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The IDE

Eclipse is a free Java based IDE environment extensible by installing plugins. Normally Eclipse is used to write Java applications but thanks to a lot of existing sub projects (e.g. PDT) it is possible to use Eclipse to program in a large variety of languages. Our interest will focus on PDT (PHP Development Tools) which provides a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform.

Why Eclipse?

First of all it's cross platform. It works just fine on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Linux. All you have to do is download the package from the web than extract its content and finally run the environment.

Another reason to use Eclipse is the huge quantity of plugins available for free. By installing plugins into Eclipse we can increase the base set of features.

The collaboration suite

SVN (Subversion) is an open source version control system. It may be used to make possible team work, track code revisions, keep the source code clean, etc... It basically works as a checkout-modify-commit system with a lot of capabilities like automatic code conflicts merging. It is composed by a client side part and a server side part. The first one is available as a Eclipse plugin (Subversive and Subclipse are the best ones) and the second one is usually installed on a (local o remote) server to provide team work features.
SVN is cross platform and it is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Linux as well as a lot of other Operating Systems. SVN repositories may be accessed via a lot of protocols each one useful in a specific circumstance. For example it is possible to use http:// or https:// if clients and server are in separated networks and particular firewall rules allow only this kind of traffic. file:// may be used if client and server resides on the same host; svn+ssh:// is useful when you only have shell access on a remote server, in fact SVN traffic is encapsulated in SSH packets.

The server

PHP works really fine on LAMP environments. Apache and MySQL are the most widespread server applications on the Web and Linux is the ideal platform to deploy them: it is open source and available in a large variety of free or commercial distributions. One of the most appreciated distributions is Ubuntu, derived from Debian and also packaged in a server specific version.

Stay tuned for new features!