php debugger finally

I've been looking around for free php debuggers. I never did get $DAYJOB to spring for nuedit phpED (and anyway, I couldn't get the demo to work when I downloaded and tried it). I've been struggling with Dmitri's DBG for a long time. Sometimes I'd get it working and sometimes not. Lately I had it pretty stable, but I never actually wanted to work with the command line debugger client since it was so ugly, not even being as nice as gdb, for instance.

I got xdebug working but didn't like the command line client. There are a lot of options though for clients. I could only test free clients though. I tried two windows clients under wine. Neither worked and I didn't care enough to work very hard at them.

Xdebug support is supposed to be in the PHP Development Tools but after trying that out for two hours or so last night (much of that time spent downloading eclipse, once from ubuntu, and once from PDT), I gave up and went to bed. I couldn't get the debugger to talk to the spawned command line program, or to a web program. I think that was mainly a failure of documentation though. It looks like a great plugin to eclipse, but I couldn't figure out how to make things work because I couldn't find any clear documentation (it may be there anyway, I just can't find it).

Timmy woke up early and I got him to sleep at 2:20AM. I went downstairs (the other hour of eclipse work) and, in between resizing videos I installed protoeditor. This was an install from source. I had to install a bunch of libraries it needed, but finally I got it compiled and running and actually stepping through a program (running under apache, and also under the command line).

This has got me sufficiently excited that I'm totally stressing my bandwidth at home and at work because I'm installing required packages on a centos 4.x vmware image at home and on my feisty box at work. Both downloads are going slow and are downloading huge numbers of packages. Ah well. I wouldn't install on the VM except I work with a team who all use a similar VM, so I need to be able to tell them how to install protoeditor on their VMs. They could install it on their host distros, but then they'd be on their own with that. Damn, I'm just at the initial yum update on the centos 4.x VM and it's downloading 95 packages!

Packages I needed to install (may not be complete since I've also previously manually installed a whole bunch of other software on this box, so it's not a virgin gutsy install anymore):

• xlibs-dev
  
• libqt3-headers
  
• libqt3-mt
  
• libqt3-mt-dev (not sure if really needed, I installed it anyway)
  
• kde-devel (which pulls in a boatload of stuff)
  

OK. I just installed that on my computer at work to see if protoeditor would ./configure. It is now. I'll test if protoeditor is really working tomorrow. I could test now, but I don't like running X applications remotely over my VPN :-).

It works great locally on my laptop though.