The Laravel News Podcast has released their latest episode, Episode #13 hosted by PHP and Laravel community member Eric L. Barnes.

In this episode, we talk about Laravel Exception Reporter, Chrome Bandwidth limiter, Chrome extension to generate Laravel tests, Jigsaw, Helpspot Vault, Fixing MySql Memory, Sparkwatch, and Taxes.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by subscribing either through iTunes or their RSS feed.

Marcel Pociot has a new post on his site introducing a new tool he's created allowing for the easier creation of tests for your Laravel application: the TestTools Chrome extension.

Testing a Laravel application really is an easy task - the "Integrated" package from Jeffrey Way, that later got merged into the core framework is fantastic and helps you with the otherwise cumbersome task of testing and interacting with your application. But still - are you actually using tests?

A lot of times people really love the idea of tests, but simply don't get their asses up to start using them in their own projects. That's why I created a chrome extension that hopefully saves you some time when you need to test your app

He also includes an animation or two of the Chrome extension in action, showing you what kind of results you can expect. He does point out that there's some limitations of the tool including the fact that you can't really test a single-page application with it as it relies on the normal browser interaction points, not Javascript events.

The Laravel News site has a post talking about a Chrome extension to fetch the weather, created by Tim Leland, that's powered by a Laravel-based backend application.

Tim Leland has created a new Chrome Extension for getting not only the current weather, but today’s outlook, and a 5-day forecast. The extension automatically calculates your location and viewing the current temperature is as simple glancing at the menu bar. The temperature is always visible and when you click the button it loads the modal window as shown above. It’s simple and intuitive.

The Extension itself uses a Laravel backend and I wanted to find out more how it works.

The rest of the post shares the Q&A with Tim all about the extension. He answers questions about:

• why he created the extension
• how it works with the backend to pull the latest weather
• where Laravel fits into the process

You can find the extension over in the Chrome store and get it installed.

In a new post today Martin Sikora has points out a Google Chrome extension he's created that lets you view some of the basics of the PHP manual without leaving the browser.

Finally, I released my extension for Google Chrome called PHP Ninja Manual (Ninja - because I like Avinash Kaushik'sblog and he always call people who are very skilled in something as "Ninjas"). I was always lazy to open PHP documentation every time I had to look at some method definition and its parameters so I made this extension which is actually preparsed official PHP manual available instantly in a popup window.

You can see a screenshot of it in action here including the auto-complete searching and the example of the function's summary details. If you try it out and have feedback, go over to the forum for it and leave your comments.

PHPClasses.org has posted their latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series, Is PHP 5.4 really coming soon?

On the episode 12 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss the latest developments and what is still stalling the progress of the developments needed to make PHP 5.4 happen.

They also have a bit of discussion about which browser is better for development - Chrome or Firefox (and the places Chrome might be lacking). You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 to listen at your convenience.

Jeremy Cook sent in a new tip about a new debugging extension for Google Chrome that hooks into the DBG debugger to help you test your PHP applications - a DBG Debugger Helper (currently in version 0.0.0.1).

For those using the DBG debugger for PHP development, this minimal extension provides a convenient way to initiate debugging and profiling sessions. The most likely users will be anyone using Nusphere's PhpED. This commercial PHP IDE includes a robust, up-to-date, and full-featured DBG debugger. [...] Installation, configuration, and use is quick and simple. While you can configure the clienthost, port, and session ID entries of the Options dialog, this is not required.

The extension makes it as simple as one click to start and stop the debugging process that will watch round trip requests and catch errors to allow DBG to provide things like backtraces, work through the script step by step.

Derick Rethans has posted about some new browser extensions for the popular PHP-based debugger Xdebug. These are to replace the helper that is no longer available on FireFox's site (download).

Years ago I wrote about a Firefox extension that allows you to start an Xdebug debugging session by clicking on an icon in Firefox' status bar. For some unexplained reason, this extension is no longer available through Firefox' addon-site. [...] There are now a few other browser extensions that do the same thing.

He lists three new extensions that can most of what you'd need to keep your testing going - easy Xdebug, Xdebug enabler (for Chrome) and this blog post with a pure Javascript method done with bookmarklets.

Dennis sent in a submission about a toolbar he's created to work with the Zend Debugger (in an extension) for the Chrome Browser:

Since i have not yet seen an official extension for chrome (or i have not looked hard enough), i created one so i don't have to switch back to Firefox all the time, while I wait for the official extension. It only has the basic functionality (debug, debug next, profile and some configuration options) and it probably has some bugs and quirks, but it functions fine for me.

You can download this toolbar from here and if you have issues installing it, you might check out this post on the Zend Forums.