Expression Web 2 for PHP Developers—Simplifying Your PHP Applications

With the advent of Microsoft's Expression Web, many PHP developers saw this tool as tightly tied with Silverlight and Microsoft development environments—and for Expression Web 1, they were right, But with the release of Expression Web 2, Microsoft offers PHP developers a host of features that can assist you, even if you're not a hardcore Microsoft developer. From a robust testing and development environment, support for PHP includes, IntelliSense and proper handling of Byte Order Marks (BOMs) and more, Expression Web 2 simplifies the development of your PHP applications. Let's look at these in more detail.

Built-In Development Server with Integrated Browser Support
Speed and efficiency matter a lot with all forms of application development. Testing any PHP document during development obviously requires a web server, either local or remote. The disadvantage of using a remote web server is the inconvenience and time required to upload new and changed files to the remote server. For this reason, developers generally install a web server on their development computer. However, full fledged web servers such as Apache and IIS are complex applications and required configuration tasks can be rather challenging. Moreover, the use of a separate web server for testing development pages requires manual switching back and forth between multiple applications.

In steps Microsoft's Expression Web 2 (EW2).

For starters, EW2 has a built-in web server that is capable of displaying PHP pages and is virtually configuration free. (Expression Web 1 also included a built-in web server but it wasn't capable of displaying PHP pages.)

To take advantage of this all you need to do is specify the location on your hard disk of the PHP runtime to use for processing PHP content in your web pages. But the real strength of EW2's built-in web server is its integration with different browsers. When you select Preview in Browser from the EW2 menu, you are presented with the choice of various browsers—including browsers preconfigured to different window sizes—in which to view your page. (Of course, this list of browsers is limited to those which you have actually installed on your computer.) You can even make a single selection to simultaneously launch your page in multiple browsers (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Expression Web 2 makes it easy for you to test your PHP application in multiple browsers and at multiple resolutions.

As is readily obvious, comparing the treatment of a given web page in different browsers and at different window sizes couldn't be easier. The F12 hotkey makes this even more convenient by previewing the selected page in the most recently used browser. A developer can add any number of additional browsers to the original list by selecting the Edit Browser List entry. (Of course, you can only add a browser to this list once it has been installed on your computer.) This linked screencast illustrates the use of the EW2 built in web server.