netbeans

Note: This article assumes that you have a working Apache/PHP environment running with the latest major version of Netbeans (current 7) installed.

Xdebug is a brilliant PHP extension that provides both debugging and profiling tools. From a basic install it will vastly improve the quality of the error messages but it can also be made to interactively debug scripts using a number of different IDE's. It can also be used as a code profiling tool, but I won't be going into that in this post as that is a little beyond the scope of what I will be talking about.

Installation

If you are using XAMMP to host your Apache/PHP environment then you can skip the following step. Xdebug is actually bundled with XAMMP so you just need to enable it by going into your php.ini file and uncommenting the options you need.

Netbeans is a great IDE and with every version lots more features are introduced that make it even better. One thing that I like to use is the code templates, which have been available from version 6.5. Code templates allows you to type a simple command and get a section of code. What commands you can use depend on what version of Netbeans you are using and which programming language you focused on. As a PHP developer I usually download the PHP version, which comes with a set of PHP code templates. To try one out go into a PHP file in Netbeans and enter if followed by a tab. Netbeans will automatically change this into the following: