[tlug] [OT] Recommendations for PHP debuggers?

[<stephen@example.com>]

Maybe Josh and others will have a different opinion, but I think you
can drop the [OT] for most of your questions.  There are a lot of
webmasters on this list, both pros and hobbyists.  Product
recommendations from people whose advice you know and value are better
than what you get on random forums, and installation is a system admin
task, e.g., more appropriate for a generic Linux forum than for a PHP
forum primarily inhabited by Windows users.

Dave M G writes:

 > After that PHPeclipse seems good. By "seems" I mean that I've installed 
 > Eclipse and PHPeclipse and can run them and see they it has a sexy 
 > interface and all. But trying to download the DBG package that makes 
 > PHPeclipse interface with the server is a sysiphean task of trying to 
 > find any instructions anywhere that make sense.

The instructions on the main DBG site look straightforward and clear
to me.  That's not intended to put you down---I mean that with help
you should be able to get it running.  I am unwilling to walk you
through it myself because I don't "do" PHP and don't feel like
installing it to deal with the inevitable "cut-and-try" issue or
three, but probably somebody else will.

That fact that two candidate debuggers are based on DBG suggests that
it's pretty good, and robust.

BTW, the way you're going these days, I think it would be a good idea
to get acquainted with Eclipse, or deepen your relationship if you're
already acquainted.  Because of its plug-in architecture, you're
likely to be able to find modules to help with or even automate many
of your tasks.  It's extremely popular, both with developers (new
modules every day) and users.  It has a lot of the character that
makes people like me love Emacs, but with less of the for-hackers-only
Attitude, and you get lots more add-on modules.

On the political economy of free software:

 > I'm hoping to find advice here because from what I can tell on the
 > net, most PHP debugging applications are for Windows, against what
 > I would have expected.

Heh.  People do not write debuggers for fun, and the way to make money
is to find a large customer population, most of whom have more money
than brains.  Windows qualifies, Linux does not.  (Note that
evaluation of which group has more brains is left to the reader, none
is implied. :-)

It's also possible that the Unix admins have much greater access to
the server system than the Windows-based admins do, so don't need a
debugger module as much.

 > After all, aren't the newbies the ones most likely to be the ones
 > to use a GUI debugger?

Not in my experience.  Newbies don't use debuggers of any kind, while
a good GUI control panel is very useful to an expert debugger.

Steve