NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

On 1/27/2012 10:14 AM, David Mintz wrote:
> I could not possibly imagine living without Firebug and FirePHP. I am thinking
> more along the lines of XDebug.

Never used Firebug and FirePHP, but I will take it for a spin...when I ever 
get around to do some PHP coding again. Years back I looked around for good 
implementations of a PHP debugger and ended up going back to the 'source' of 
one using PhpED from Nusphere: the DBG debugger. In a nutshell, whatever you 
want to echo you can do with a debugger, and even more as you can do that 
before output is supposed to start or when there is no output at all. I tend 
to create separate script files depending on functional area 
(input/processing/output) and the processing files never generate any output. 
Throwing an echo in there would only add code that I have to take out 
later...and potentially forget about.
Debuggers also show you the content of all variables and arrays and system 
values at a breakpoint, which is another benefit, because with break points 
you can continue on, which an echo it is not that easy, especially when the 
actual output with proper html header is yet to follow (and will fail).
There are a few implementations of DBG in other editors that do not work 
across separate scripts, which is just useless. But no matter which debugger 
you have available, learning the basics of how to use it is time well spent.
Other tools worthwhile to learn how to use are a profiler and 
phpdocumentor....unless you don't care about creating docs and flowcharts and 
stuff like that for others.


David