NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

Ben Sgro wrote:
> I can't comment on vi + xdebug (im an emacs guys) but w/komodo & xdebug 
> - what is so "impressive"
> is the ability for me to step through my code.

Seems we are plugging our favourtite debuggers, but this and all the other 
pros mentioned in the original email also apply to DBG. If you are on a budget 
that is 0$ and develop for private use get in touch with the guys from 
WaterProof. They give away their PHP IDE and it includes the free version of 
DBG as well. It is the best Windows based PHP IDE one can get for free. 
Another good one is Luckasoft's EnginSite Editor for PHP. It is not for free 
unless you happen to know a language that is currently not listed and 
translate the string file and help. I did that for German and got a free 
license. Enginsite PHP Editor is really an awesome IDE, but the implementation 
of the debugger is a bit off since it requires to stop at the first line of 
code of each file. So if you design your projects into multiple files (one 
file for each logical task section) then this gets old really fast. Some plop 
everything into one file and build a overarching structure into it, in that 
case it won't be such a drag. And that was the only reason why I spend money 
and bought NuSphere's IDE (and recently the upgrade for 39$ so that I can use 
it on my 64bit XP box). The developer of DBG works for NuSphere and they 
include the commercial version of DBG that can do many more tricks.
I did once take a stab at xdebug under Eclipse, but I couldn't get xdebug to 
work with Eclipse. While Eclipse is probably an awesome Java IDE I found it to 
be unsuitable for PHP and given all the hype around Eclipse I also found the 
whole package quite underwhelming. Maybe it is better now and doesn't come as 
a giant jigsaw puzzle with mismtached pieces that one has to glue together. Ah 
yes, and then there is the Zend IDE, which also has a debugger. I just found 
the Zend IDE to be counterintuitive. If I cannot figure even out how to create 
a new project after RTFMing and poking around for an hour I am either too 
dense for it or the application is misdesigned, in either case I found it to 
be no fit for me.
I did try Komodo, it was among the IDEs I considered, but the pricing was out 
of my league. I just saw that there is now OpenKomodo. I guess it won't hurt 
to try it. As much as I like NuSphere's stuff, their licensing sucks. I bought 
version 5.0 and two months later they release 5.1. One would think that the 
license is good for the dot releases, but no, it is only good for the dotdot 
releases. One more reason to use FOSS, but then I'm back to something like 
Eclipse or some other editor that has PHP syntax highlighting bolted on and 
can pull stuff through a debugger when I stuff it into Apache myself. I guess 
I have to pay for convenience and the few bucks for a real PHP only IDE were 
well worth it, especially for the much better debugger implementation.
I also tried Maguma and it wasn't horrible, but fell short in several places. 
And since their website is now a parked domain I assume it is no longer 
maintained.

In the end, I fully agree what Ben wrote about debuggers regardless of which 
one we each favor. You really want a good one that works and at least lets you 
do step by step code execution, allows for setting breakpoints, and has a 
variable watch so that you can see what ishouldhavepickedabettername$ really 
contains, especially when it is an array. It makes testing and bug fixing much 
easier and quickly lets one find out which code is OK and which code is crap.

One round of applause for PHP debuggers. :)

David