On NetTuts.com there's a new post spotlighting an interesting tool you can use to help make debugging an easier (and prettier) experience in PHP, the Whoops library.

Whoops is a small library, available as a Composer package, that helps you handle errors and exceptions across your PHP projects. Out of the box, you get a sleek, intuitive and informative error page each time something goes pants-up in your application.

It provides you with detailed error messages, a "code view" of where the error was found, support for Ajax/JSON requests and providers for several popular frameworks. The system is made up of a set of handlers that execute in order to provide the resulting page of output. He goes through how to install the tool (via Composer) and what you'll need to know to put it to use. He shows how to change up some of the configuration options and add in some extra info to the output. There's also a section specifically about integrating it with the Laravel 4 framework.