Posts Tagged with: nWire

nWire for PHP is finally getting a much deserved attention. Read the following press release which was done in cooperation with our partners at Zend.

Here's a Quote from Zeev Suraski, co-founder and CTO at Zend Technologies:

"As PHP applications scale and meet rapidly expanding requirements, the use of advanced, design-pattern based architectures is becoming more and more widespread. While advanced frameworks like Zend Framework provide great basis to build on, making the most of them can sometimes be challenging. nWire's solution, sporting tight integration with Zend Studio 7.0 and PDT, enables developers to build and maintain complex, large-scale applications while greatly reducing the time and pain normally involved with understanding existing application architecture and code. I believe many developers will find it as an invaluable addition to their toolbox."

The next release of nWire is already in beta and, as you all know, its' main focus is PHP. However, we will have some important enhancements for our loyal Java customers as well. The most noticeable would be the Smart Focus.

The Smart Focus aims at assisting in finding information fast by minimizing the information which is presented in the first navigator column. Today, this column shows an outline of the current resource. Since most of us already use the Eclipse Outline View, this seems redundant. The Smart Focus shows only the most relevant items at the given spot. So, for example, if the cursor is located over a method invocation, you will immediately see the invocation in the first column and all the invocation associations in the second column.

We want to hear what you think, so visit our forum and let us know. The following image illustrates the new feature.

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It is time to unveil the details of our next release. Since its' initial released, nWire was targeted at multiple languages. We are very happy to announce that the next language to be supported by nWire will be... drumroll... PHP.

We partnered with Zend Technologies, the leaders of the PHP language, and customized nWire to fit their latest Zend Studio 7.0 and Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.1. You can read more about the new tool on this page.

Since this is a major step for nWire, we will conduct a short beta stage. We are currently in private beta and the public beta will follow shortly after. We invite you to sign-up and be notified when the beta is publicly available.

Working with PHP is a true challenge for nWire since the language is dynamic and loosely typed. The PHP environment performs only a syntactic check, unlike the Java compiler that alerts on a wide range of issues. We worked hard to ensure that as much information as possible is gathered in the analysis process. Naturally, structured code will result in a more meaningful representation.

Once released, the new product will be named nWire for PHP, while the current nWire will be renamed as nWire for Java. It is possible to install both products on the same IDE and we will offer a discounted price for a joint license.

nWire 1.0 was launched about a month ago and we got plenty of useful feedback. One of the main requests was to reduce the amount of information presented in nWire. Specifically, it was clear that navigating to outbound links is very easy, while finding the inbound references is the more challenging task, where nWire shines. For example, when method A invokes method B, it is very simple to follow this path from method A to B (the all-time favorite Ctrl/Command + click does the trick just fine). However, finding all the methods which invoke B from method A requires more work.

nWire 1.1 adds a new feature which makes this super-easy: filters. From the UI perspective, this is what you get:

• A drop-down menu or a combo-box allowing you to select the filter for the navigator or visualizer (the same filter applies for both).
• A filter definition preferences box enabling definition of new filters.

The system comes with 3 predefined filters: All, Outbound only and Inbound only. From there you can define your own filters. Here are some examples of what some possible filters:

• Invocations - show only invocations of methods. Naturally, the execution chain may be broken when one method overrides a super-class method or implements an interface method. No problem, add the method implements & overrides method associations to the filter and get all possible execution paths at design-time!
• Class Diagrams - using a filter which focuses on class extensions and interface implementations you get a very quick method for producing class diagrams on the fly.

Naturally, there are a lot more possible filters which show different aspects of the code. We are certain that you will define some creative filters of your own. Let us know what are your favorite filters and we will post them on our web site. The filters can be exported from the workspace and imported to another workspace, so they are easy to share and exchange. Refer to our getting started guide for more details.

We are hard at work on version 1.1. One of the key features will be a much requested feature: filters. The ability to filter the information is critical, as nWire view can get crowded. Filtering allows you to get more specific views on your code like invocation diagram or inheritance diagrams.

It is one of these cases where a picture is worth a thousand words. The first image shows an example of the visualizer, showing invocations only.

The second image shows the new filters preferences pane. This is where filters are defined. There are a number of built-in filters and more can be added. If you have any feedback on this UI, drop us a line.