If you've been working with PHP for any length of time, you know that one of the issues the language has shows up when you're trying to debug your applications. Thankfully, as Juan Treminio points out, there's a better way - Xdebug.

Xdebug is a PHP extension that was written and is maintained by Derick Rethans. It provides debugging and profiling capabilities, although I’ll be mostly focusing on the debugging aspects in this tutorial. With it you can set a breakpoint and pause the execution of a script to see the state of your application at that exact point, including what variables/objects have been instantiated and what their values are. Xdebug completely replaces the need to litter your code with echo, print_r() or var_dump() calls, and displays information on all variables, not just the one you passed.

He talks some about the current state of IDE/editor support for the tool and shows how to get it installed and your php.ini configured to use it. XDebug make it easy to turn on/off debugging thanks to a handy browser-based switch. He links to a bookmarklet you can use to make it a one-click operation. He includes the setup for using the debugging in PHPStorm, but it's pretty similar for most of the IDEs out there.