I’m doing more and more PHP development at work, and as the size and complexity of the projects I’m working on has increased debugging them has become more and more troublesome. I’m using Dreamweaver 8 for development, which is fine for writing code, but it lacks variable watches, break points, step through/into, etc. I basically have to throw in random echos to see my variable states and when/if my control structures get executed. In short: it sucks. Any recommendations for a debugger, or a full blow IDE?
My man, once you’ve been buggered, you can’t just debugger yourself. I’d take the full blow.
Seriously now, Zend is popular, ubiquitous and well-supported. But it does have detractors.
I’ve never had luck with the Zend stuff, it always seemed flaky and prone to asploding. With PHP I’ve relied on a shit load of asserts and tests in order to find bugs as quickly as possible.
I’m trying to move away from PHP if at all possible, so I’ve been using Python more (e.g. TurboGears) and looking at shudder ASP.Net.