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Tools used in Gapfill development

Marcus Green edited this page Dec 8, 2018 · 6 revisions

Operating Systems

I develop under Windows 8.1 with XAMPP, an implementation of the Apache, MySQL and PHP stack. I upload to shared hosting which uses Linux for wider testing.

IDE

I used to use Netbeans in PHP mode for most development and occasionally use Notepad++. I have since switched to Microsoft Visual Studio Code, which is available under the MIT License and is probably the most impressive developer tool I have used in 20 years, free or paid for. I use the xdebug tools for debugging.

Testing

My main browsers are Firefox and Chrome and towards the end of developing each version I run it through MS IE.

Databases

In addition to the default MySQL which ships with XAMPP I test with PostGres for Windows and MS SQL Server. I do not currently test against Oracle but I have worked hard to ensure that all database related code uses the standard Moodle SQL API to ensure compatibility across databases.

Automated Unit Testing

I use PHPUnit (the Moodle standard) to run automated testing and have approximately 150 tests at the moment. I have a suite of Behat tests which test both in question preview and questions in a quiz situations.