I am a .NET/C# developer helping out my cousin by reviewing OpenEMR.
Could someone recommend a good open source development tool for PHP? I have searched the web and found Eclipse but since I’ve never used Eclipse I thought it would be wise to ask.
I have reviewed openEMR documentation and found a few articles on the architecture. One question I could not find an answer for - is the architecture layered in such a way that the user interface can be modified fairly easily? My cousin says the user interface is a little hard for him. I told him he is just used to slick looking web sites that really do nothing. :-).
Hi
By the way you may want to take a look at the mono project for .NET/#C. Its cross platform so things you develop on windows will run on linux as well.
Much of the UI is embedded in PHP code. A little is split out into templates used by PHP Smarty. And then there is a growing collection of classes in the CSS files.
Given that none of us developers are graphic designers we do our best to match function with fashion. But tend to be heavy on function and less on fashion.
I’ve been working on splitting out as much as possible into DIV tags and CSS styling. Personally, I like the ‘classic’ style of OpenEMR with a menu at the top versus the newer styles with a stack of radio buttons or tree on the left side.
For a PHP editor… go for Eclipse. I’ve never used it, preferring command line coding in UNIX with ViM.
Coming from .NET/C#, you’d probably be most comfortable developing in Zend Studio. You can get most of the features for free by downloading Eclipse and PDT, but there’s a LOT more in the $ version.
Eclipse sounds promising as I am the first to admit i’m spoiled having the Visual Studio IDE.
I will also look into some of the open source tools mentioned - vim, grep ,etc.
I understand being heavy on function and less on fashion - I operate in that realm all the time. Luckily I have a graphic designer to lean on.
I’m well aware of mono as i do game programming using Unity and mono is the platform it uses. I’m not sure how mono would help me w/ OpenEMR though, would it? Unless i’m adding an API to be called by openEMR or something of that nature.
