One of the most widely used open source server side coding languages used today is PHP. Major website such as Facebook, Digg, WordPress etc use this technology as it has been a wide spread one with over 20 million indexed domains. PHP developers build faster using the technology and it is the most preferred language for scripting practically. The documentation it consists is detailed; it has a very broad community for PHP programmers to interact for help and development.
About PHP Tools
One of the tools implemented by PHP programmers is Xdebug. It is one of the most widely used debugging extensions used to find bugs in their source code. Almost all popular PHP applications accept to plug in Xdebug. Some such applications are PHPEclipse and PHPDesigner.
PHP developers use a tool called Gubed PHP Debugger which is an extension to the PHP platform. The main function of this extension is to locate and identify exclusively the logical errors present in the code. For remote and local PHP debugging, an extension called DBG which is a very robust extension for PHP development.
PHP_Debug is an open source extension which enables PHP developers to get necessary details about their PHP code which helps them in various ways to debug the errors in the code. This extension efficiently analyzes the performance of the code written, displays a graphical representation of variable dumps in the code. If the PHP programmers need more than one graphical output than the one provided by print_r() then this is the best extension the PHP developers can avail.
One other highly efficient debugging tool is the PHP_Dyn extension by using this extension, can trace the process of execution of the code they have written. By doing this the PHP developers can also return the values back to the functions by getting the output of the arguments.
Tool for Mac OS
There is another extension also available exclusively for PHP programmers building PHP projects using the MAC Platform as their Operating System. This extension is called MacGDBp which is a live application for PHP. All features expected by a PHP programmer can be found in this extension but the only drawback is that it is exclusively for Mac OS. This extension searches every line of the whole block of code, which might even be of a thousand or more lines; it also sets break points in the code to split it into modules for further testing to be done in a more efficient way.
