Here's more information from their press release:

Blue Static today is announcing the release date of MacGDBp, a native Cocoa application that allows Web developers to debug their PHP applications. The tool makes use of the Xdebug (http://www.xdebug.org) PHP extension that provides remote debugging functionality. Blue Static will be releasing the software under the GNU GPL version 2 on the morning of Tuesday, 17 June 2008.

The interface for the application is modeled after the XCode product from Apple to help integrate it more fully into the OS look and feel. It will require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to run and screenshots of the tool can be found here and here.

Debugging a PHP application or a PHP web server requires connectivity between an IDE and a Debugger engine (a PHP module which is installed on the web server). The debug protocol defines this connection. [...] When the Eclipse Foundation approved the PHP IDE project, Zend Studio's debug protocol was opened source and was chosen to be the debug protocol of the PHP IDE project.

He goes through why they made the choice, touches a bit on the security aspect of the two debugging protocols he mentioned (DBGp and Zend Studio's) as well as their common methods for output.

I am a PHP developer. Maybe even a halfway decent one. As such, I often find myself engaged in conversations on the subject of web application development in general and PHP in particular. I am continually flustered by the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods that technical and non-technical people alike hold about this humble programming language.

Some of the points included in his "top ten" list are things like "PHP Encourages Sloppy Code", "PHP is slow because it's interpreted" and "PHP apps all look the same".

This article is the first installment of a five-part series of articles covering xdebug, a free and open source swiss army knife tool for PHP developers. xdebug is a PHP extension created by Derick Rethans, one of the PHP core developers. This week, we will show you how to install xdebug and introduce you to some of the basic features. In the subsequent parts of this article series, we will have a closer look at one of xdebug's main features, namely tracing, profiling, debugging, and code coverage.

In this first installment, he looks at installing the software (both on a unix-based system and on a Windows box) and how to turn it on to work with your web server. He also mentions some of the error output options including the "new and improved" var_dump call and the stack trace method to help you locate exactly where in the code the error's hidden.

A special application called a debugger probes running code, allowing you to suspend execution arbitrarily, examine objects, explore the call stack, and even change the value of a variable on the fly. Learn how to use a debugger to squash bugs in your PHP code.

They look at the history of debugging (briefly) and show how to get the debugger installed and working with your PHP server. They have the instructions for a Mac OS X machine, but the setup is pretty similar for any other operating system. Screenshots and example code are all over the place, guiding you towards their test - debugging a simple application (making pizza).

I just released Xdebug 2.0.2. This bugfix release addresses some issues that were introduced with the improved code coverage performance in Xdebug 2.0.1. There are a few other issues left, which will be addressed in a future version.

Fixes include correcting a crash on empty PHP files, a crash when including a file that doesn't exist, an issue with CLI error logging and the direction of the var_dump function call.

We were looking for a simple open-source PHP profiler, without any fancy IDEs like Zend bundled together. After a little search, we found one: Xdebug, debugger and profiler tool for PHP.

XDebug is "extension helps you debugging your script by providing a lot of valuable debug information. The debug information that Xdebug can provide includes the following: stack traces, memory allocation and protection for infinite recursions".

I did a quick little screencast on how to get rolling with the MyBic 2 Firebug PHP Debugger.

The screencast (mov) steps through the setup of the debugger support for the framework via the Firefox extension all set up custom to work magically with the MyBic framework.

I'm proud to announce to official 1.0.0 release of the MyBic AJAX framework. MyBic has been stable in production for months now with 0 memory leaks and 0 outstanding bugs known to date. MyBic has been successfully flying in some of the worlds top aircraft with 0 supervision in kiosk based devices.

Major advancements for this release include the addition of support for the Firebug debugger with a Firefox extension bundled in. You can grab this latest update from the project's website.

Updates in this latest version include:

• All php versions from 4.3 up to 5.2 are supported
• Fixed problem with profiler denominator
• Pre-compiled binaries for Win32 and Linux
• Source code

It's not going to be quite as powerful as the one that comes with the full version of PhpEd, but it is still a very useful little app. download it for yourself and give it a try.