Useful PHP application Development Tools Part 1

PHP is most used language on the web. Nearly 20 million websites are made up of PHP. Websites like Facebook, Digg, WordPress, Wikipedia, etc. are its best examples. PHP is easy to learn script therefore it has huge developer community working round the clock. It has ready-to-use scripts and well supported frameworks. Adding something to it here we provide a comprehensive list of some useful PHP tools that can make developers work easy and effective.

Debugging Tools
Webgrind Webgrind is an Xdebug profiling web frontend in PHP5. It implements a subset of the features of kcachegrind and installs in seconds and works on all platforms. For quick'n'dirty optimizations it does the job. Features:

Super simple, cross platform installation Track time spent in functions by self-cost or inclusive cost. Inclusive cost is time inside function + calls to other functions. See if time is spent in internal or user functions. See where any function was called from and which functions it calls.

Installation:

1. Download webgrind 2. Unzip package to favorite path accessible by webserver. 3. Load webgrind in browser and start profiling

Xdebug Xdebug is one of the most popular debugging PHP extensions. It provides a ton of useful data to help you quickly find bugs in your source code. Xdebug plugs right into many of the most popular PHP applications, such as PHPEclipse and phpDesigner.

Gubed PHP Debugger As the name implies, Gubed PHP Debugger is a PHP debugging tool for hunting down logic errors.

DBG DBG is a a full-featured php debugger, an interactive tool that helps you debugging php scripts. It works on a production and/or development WEB server and allows you debug your scripts locally or remotely, from an IDE or console. Features:

native debugger. Works transparently, neither script nor PHP engine modifications required. server part (dbg module) runs on all platforms where PHP itself runs. works transparently across the global network as well as locally. JIT. When enabled it can start debugging Just In Time when an error happens. supports back-trace, e.g. displays a list of all procedures with their local variables, the current execution position reached from. In other words you can watch local variables or function parameters in all active and nested scopes. certainly, you can execute script in the debugger step by step (step-in, step-out, step-over, run to cursor, change execution point withing current scope...), evaluate any valid php expression(s) or inspect arrays, classes and simple variables, modify their values on the fly and even create any new variables. Dbg supports conditional breakpoints and even global ones (commercial version only). Breakpoints can be skipped specified number of times. allows to change execution point (commercial version only). has embedded profiler, so now it's easy to find out a bottleneck in the scripts. allows multiple debugger processes running simultaneously. compatible with php-4.0.6 and higher. has open COM interfaces for integration with win32-based 3rd party IDEs.

PHP_Debug PHP_Debug is an open-source project that gives you useful information about your PHP code that can be used for debugging. It can output processing times of your PHP and SQL, check the performance of particular code blocks and get variable dumps in graphical form, which is great if you need a more visual output than the one given to you by print_r() or var_dump(). Features:

General process time SQL/PHP Check performance of parts of code Show sql of executed queries (with highlighting and execution time) Dump of all types of variable in a graphical way Functionnal/trace debug (with line, file, class, function) Show globals vars ($GLOBALS, $_POST, $_GET, $_COOKIE ...)

2 renderers, as a HTML talbe or as a floating div Allow to watch variables (+ watch on type of var) Show php version & loaded extensions Allow to show source code of all parsed file (with TEXT_Highlighter) Static methods to debug/trace out of the debug renderer display Debug infos are classified by type (14 types available) Can replace the PHP error handler to show messages inside the debug renderer

PHP_Dyn PHP_Dyn is another excellent PHP debugging tool thats open-source. You can trace execution and get an output of the argument and return values of your functions.

MacGDBp MacGDBp is a live PHP debugger application for the Mac OS. It has all the features youd expect from a fully featured debugger, such as the ability to step through your code and set breakpoints.