Devit!

Debugging web applications has always been a problem. How do you step through scripts, view variable information and create breakpoints when your application is running on a remote server?

Step in XDebug. In a nutshell XDebug runs on the server and allows you to control how your application runs from a client. XDebug calls this concept remote debugging. We use Eclipse for our PHP development however there are a number of other clients XDebug supports including Dev-PHP, NetBeans, Notepad++, PHPEdit and a number more. The client connects to the XDebug running on the development server to send control messages and receive server data.

The biggest feature in my mind is the ability to set breakpoints and see the values of any variable that has been initialized in your script. Eclipse provides a conveniant table display to show all variables. This includes PHP environment variables (_SERVER, _COOKIE, _ENV, _FILES, etc…), global and local variables.

Jeremy

Jeremy has a love hate relationship with computers , and in contemplative moments he has been known to muse on the fact that his life’s work is in reality a long string of 1’s and 0’s. When he’s not banging code into his keyboard at work, Jeremy is banging out beats for his band “Sad Skelton” that you can check out at www.sadskelton.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am and is filed under Devit!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.