Summary

Serious development rarely happens all in one place. A codebase needs to be separated from its installation, so that work in progress does not pollute production code that needs to remain functional at all times. Version control allows developers to check out a project and work on it in their own space. This requires that they should be able to configure the project easily for their environments. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the customer (even if the customer is yourself in a year's time, when you've forgotten the ins and outs of your code) should be able to install your project after a glance at a Read Me file.

In this chapter, I have covered some of the basics of Phing, a fantastic tool, which brings much of the functionality of Apache Ant to the PHP world. We have only scratched the surface of Phing's capabilities. Nevertheless, once you are up and running with the targets, tasks, types, and properties discussed here, you'll find it easy to bolt on new elements for advanced features, like creating tar/gzipped distributions, automatically generating PEAR package installations, and running PHP code directly from the build file.