I'm doing PHP development and I'm thinking of using one of these. I have both PHP and Java installed on my machine. In theory I could use any of the two.
What are the compelling arguments to pick Phing over Ant?
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The greatest argument I have in favor of Phing is that it's fully developed in PHP ; which means, at least :
- You can debug it / submit patches if you want
- You can develop tasks in PHP
- including tasks which are specific to your project
- that can use stuff from your project (I've written a couple of tasks that use functions of Drupal, in a drupal-based project)
- And, if you are working on a PHP project, your team probably knows PHP well -- while they might not know Java
- No need to install Java on your servers
Pascal MARTIN
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For some reason, as of version 2.16.1 I find that a lot of Phing specific tasks for tools such as `phploc`, `phpcpd`, `phpdepend`, `phpcs` and `phpmd`, for example, don't seem to work and return exceptions. Also, it seems to have a problem finding these tools even if they are in the `$PATH` directories. I ended up having to rewrite tasks to use these tools in generic Ant buildfile syntax i.e. using the `exec` task to make them work with Phing. It almost defeated the purpose of using Phing. My build server was running PHP 7.2 if that matters. – racl101 Nov 13 '18 at 21:24
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The main argument (for me) for using Phing when doing PHP development is
- staying inside the PHP Ecosystem.
- When using Phing on shared hosts, you can be sure it works when PHP works.
- And you can easily extend Phing with your own task in PHP.
- And since it's a PHP tool you will sometimes find it in other applications as well.
Gordon
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