Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: March 15th, 2021

Introduction

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine doing my PHP development without an IDE with a debugger anymore.

It autocompletes for me, it lets me step through each line of code, jumping around the project, execute and change the code flow on the fly, and does many other things that make me feel cozy, comfortable, and efficient at PHP development (as opposed to, say, CPP which makes me feel cold and lonely).

There are many PHP IDEs out there and I've tried most of them (including the free PHPEclipse and PDT for Eclipse) but kept coming back to NuSphere's PHPEd every time. The other ones just don't do as good of a job and don't have the …

As a backend developer, I don't get to work with JavaScript much anymore. However, from time to time, a project would come along that uses JavaScript (specifically, AJAX) to load some backend data on the fly. Of course, nothing works 100% right away*, so I would often have to tweak this JavaScript and massage it until it does what I need.

Here's where Firebug comes in with its JavaScript debugger. I'm used to using a debugger in every language I deal with, so using Firebug is a no brainer. Since it supports breakpoints, stopping execution and inspecting local variables and the rest of the scope generally beats alerts and console.logs for me.

Here's what a typical breakpoint looks …