On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 18:47:14 +0100, Jochem Maas <jochem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
in addition there is the xdebug extension by Derick Rethans its at version 2 but I might suggest starting with 1.3 as its alot simpler to use than 2 (then again if you have experience of things like valgrind/dbg on linux you should have little problems).
I just don't see the need. PHP explodes right on the screen for me. I can usually find and fix an error in a few seconds of seeing it in
my browser or in my terminal. Lines numbers always accompany the
error messages, and you can even go the extra mile and link the error
messages back into the PHP manual for faster lookups when required.
actually I agree with you when it come to bug hunting/fixing. especially with PHP5 and the nice stacktraces you get as part of an Exception.
but (there always a 'but' hey!)...
where I found xdebug to be very handy is in code profiling. - it helped me shave 30% (time) per request in a (way too!) generic data editing framework I wrote with a friend of mine. (we run it on a slow test server and some of the _really_ heavy pages were taking 10-15 seconds to display - 40,000 calls to strtolower()!!! for instance - and that wasn't even the 'bad' part).
thats also the reason I mentioned going for xdebug1.3x - it lets you basically dump different kinds of profiling info onto the screen in HTML format (or into a file for later viewing) where as xdebug 2.x requires using something like cachegrind to analyse the data - which is little over my head to just setup and go (i.e. too much effort to figure it out right now :-).
I haven't even look at the actually debugger functionality of xdebug!
so I reckon its overkill for most people - but nice to know its there if you ever need it.
Granted if you have a long running PHP app that's acting funky then
you might want to analyze it in more depth.. but at that point you
gotta ask yourself should you even be using PHP for the task at hand? Could this task or even part of the task be better handled better with
another language?
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