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by Douglas Clifton.
Original Post: PHP Specificity Part IV: Debugging
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Yes, I'm aware that a spider isn't technically a bug, but the cool thing about spiders is they eat bugs. This mechanical spider by Belgian sculptor Stephane Halleux looks especially menacing.
But we're not here to talk about spiders, we're here to talk about software bugs, and more specifically, debugging PHP code. In this fourth installment of the PHP Specificity series I'm going to break from the theme of content management packages momentarily and get into a topic that is not so dear to the programmer's heart. Debugging is a necessary evil and can be painful at times. But the reward, when it happens, is that eureka moment when you find the bug and squash it.
Options
I'm not sure what ever happened to DBG. The author seems to have abandoned the project, or at least stopped updating his Web site several years back. I know the product was rolled into the commercial NuSphere PhpED PHP IDE—whether they took over the code base I'm not really sure. Another option is, or rather was, the PECL package apd by George Schlossnagle. But again, it seems to be dead in the water (the last update was in 2004).
Xdebug
Fortunately, we have Xdebug, by Derick Rethans. It has all the features you'd expect from an advanced debugger, and a built-in profiler to help you tackle performance issues. With output in Cachegrind format, once you're done running the profiler on your code, you can fire up your favorite viewer to analyze the results.
If you are an IDE fan, you might want to try the Eclipse PDT, which supports both Xdebug and the Zend Debugger. Or, if you're old-school like me and a Vim user, you can configure the editor to use Xdebug with the DBGp plugin.
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Yes, I'm aware that a spider isn't 