On his site Derick Rethans, lead on the Xdebug project, has posted about the release of the latest version of the popular PHP debugging tool: Xdebug 2.6.

I have just released Xdebug 2.6. Xdebug 2.6 adds supports for PHP 7.2 (and drops support for PHP 5), and adds a whole bunch of new features. This article describes these new features.

Among the items he details are changes around:

• Garbage Collection Statistics
• Profiler Enhancements
• Remote Debugging Improvements
• Behavioural Changes

There are also some smaller improvements in the output of the tool allowing for custom filenames, superglobal details and the inclusion of assign-by-reference assignments. You can find out more about this latest version and get the latest from the main Xdebug site. If you'd like to show appreciation for all the hard work Derick has put into the tool, you should consider becoming a patron to show your support.

In a recent post the fifteenth anniversary of the XDebug PHP debugging tool was celebrated and lead developer Derick Rethans was presented with several tokens of appreciation from the PHP community. In this new post to his site he shares the experience (it was a surprise after all) from his perspective and thanks those involved.

This article was going to be about some upcoming features in the 2.6 release. Or rather, I was hoping to announce at least a beta release of Xdebug 2.6. Unfortunately, I couldn't find enough time to work on all the issues that I wanted, although I've made a little progress.

What I can write about, is a little mystery.

He talks about the initial invite from James Titcumb to meet him at his favorite whisky store and the eight special bottles that the community purchased to show their appreciation for his hard fifteen years of work on this invaluable tool. He lists out the types for those interested and some of the messages from contributors showing their appreciation. He thanks all of those involved.

And on the Xdebug front, there are plenty of bugs to fix, features to add for Xdebug 2.6, and undoubtedly Dmitry will be "breaking" some things in PHP 7.2 that I need to support in Xdebug as well.

Recently the Xdebug PHP debugging tool turned 15 and PHP community member Cal Evans wanted to do something special for the author, Derick Rethans. He started a secret fundraiser to gather contributions from all around the community and used the funds to purchase Derick several bottles of his favorite beverage. In this new post to his site Cal shares some about XDebug, Derick and a video of James Titcumb presenting Derick with his present.

There are a handful of tools that have actually changed how many of us code PHP. XDebug is one of those tools[1]. There is no doubt of the impact that XDebug has has on PHP developers and PHP projects.

Recently, XDebug turned 15. This means that the man responsible for XDebug, Derick Rethans, has been supporting XDebug for 15 years, for free. [...] So on this the (close to) anniversary of this product, many of us in the PHP community decided to do something to show Derick how much we appreciate it. Those that know him know that Derick loves a good Scotch. So we decided to buy him some.

Cal has the video embedded in the post (or here on YouTube) and offers thanks to the people and groups that helped to make the project successful.

Derick Rethans (of MongoDB) has posted an update to his site sharing the details about an improvement that comes with MongoDB 3.4 and is supported by the PHP driver: natural language sorting.

Arranging English words in order is simple—most of the time. You simply arrange them in alphabetical order. Sorting a set of German words, or French words with all of their accents, or Chinese with their different characters is a lot harder than it looks.

[...] Years ago I wrote about collation and MongoDB. There is an old issue in MongoDB's JIRA tracker, SERVER-1920, to implement collation so that sorting and indexing could work depending on the different sorting orders as described for each language (locale). Support for these collations have finally landed in MongoDB 3.4 and in this article we are going to have a look at how they work.

He starts off by explaining a bit about how Unicode collation works and PHP's support through the intl extension in the Collator class. He provides a code example using the class, showing the difference in sorting them first as English words then as Norwegian words. He moves into the MongoDB world and shows how the queries using this new collation support would be structured before moving back to PHP and using the MongoDB client to make the same requests. He also includes examples showing how to set the default locale, the "strength" (for the level of comparison), sorting and some interesting quirks with certain locales.

The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by Sammy Powers, has posted their latest episode today featuring Sammy and a selection of guests answering the question "What happened to PHP 6?". Sammy is joined by Sara Golemon, Derick Rethans, Sean Coates and Andrei Zmievski - all core developers (at one time or another) who played a part in the language around the time "PHP 6" was in the works.

Despite the fact that there was never an official release of PHP 6, it was going to be a real thing with a lot of great improvements to the engine and language. But why was this version of PHP never released? We talk with some previous and current internals developers to hear the story of what happened to PHP 6.

You can catch this latest episode either though the video (in-page or on YouTube) or you can use the in-page audio player to just listen in. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get the latest updates of when new shows are released.

Thjis Feryn has posted another in his series of video interviews with members of the PHP community during his travels. In this new episode he talks with Derick Rethans of Xdebug and MongoDb.

Derick Rethans is my guest for this episode. The interview was recorded at PHPBenelux Conference 2016 in the community village.

[...] Derick is a well-known and well-respected member of the PHP community. He is primarily known as the author and maintainer of Xdebug, a debugging extension for PHP. He also developed the DateTime extension. He even wrote a book about it. Derick works for MongoDB where he works on the MongoDB extension and the separate library.

You can catch this episode either via the video (in-page or on YouTube) or for the more audio-inclined over on SoundCloud. Be sure to check out his other interviews while you're at the site as well.

Derick Rethans continues his look at the latest version of the MongoDB drivers for both PHP and HHVM with this look at their architecture and how it's different from previous versions.

We recently released a new version of the MongoDB driver for PHP (the mongodb extension). This release is the result of nearly a year and a half of work to re-engineer and rewrite the original MongoDB driver (mongo). In the previous blog post, I covered the back story of the how and why we undertook this effort. In this new blog post, I will talk about the architecture of the new driver.

He uses the goals stated at the end of his previous post and covers:

• Support for Other PHP Engines like HHVM
• [How/Why] The Driver Should Be Bare Bones
• No Reinvention of the Wheel
• Provide an Easy to Use API
• Backwards Compatibility

From there he then gives an overview (complete with a handy graphic) of the overall MongoDB PHP ecosystem and where the extensions fit in the plan.

The Day Camp 4 Developers online "conference" has officially announced their latest event, "Debugging Beyond var_dump()", happening Friday September 18th from 9am through 3pm (CST). This time around they're putting it on with the help of the fine folks at php[architect] too.

This latest edition of the excellent event features several well known speakers talking about debugging tips and sharing tools that can make you a more effective developer:

• "PHP Profiling, an Introduction" (Fabien Potencier)
• "Debugging: Past, Present and Future" (Derick Rethans)
• "Characterization Testing for Legacy Applications" (Paul M. Jones)
• "Modern Tools for API Debugging and Testing" (Neil Mansilla)
• "Don't Reboot, Debug!" (Joshua Thijssen)

Much like it's siblings, the Day Camp 4 Developers event is completely virtual and is held via a webcast. Tickets will soon be sale and, compared to the usual cost of a conference ticket, are quite cheap. There's even group tickets available if you'd like to hold a "watch party" in your office.

Check out the Day Camp 4 Developers site for more information or to pick up your tickets!

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted the latest in their special conference-recorded "It's the Booze Talking" series of episodes (this time it was at ZendCon 2014). In this new episode Cal Evans talks with guests Jeremy Mikola, Mike Stowe, Derick Rethans and Beth Tucker-Long.

They discuss the life of a developer evangelist including travel experiences, what it's like working conferences, and how it has an impact on their family life. They also all share their worst travel story in the course of their work and what they really enjoy about their roles.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show and want to hear more episodes like this (or their usual community interviews), be sure to subscribe to their feed

On 7PHP.com today Khayrattee Wasseem has posted his latest interview with a member of the PHP community - this time it's Derick Rethans "The Father Of The PHP Swiss-Army Knife aka Xdebug".

In this edition I talked with Derick Rethans the Father Of The PHP developer’s Swiss-Army Knife aka Xdebug. Derick is an expert when it comes to the PHP Internals; no wonder he is viewed as a vibrant and “man of action” within The PHP Community. As a PHP Core Contributor, he has been at the crux of many PHP extensions and variations; the mcrypt, date and input-filter extensions, bug fixes, additions and even leading the QA team.

Derick answers questions about how he got involved with PHP and how he thinks it compares from then to now. He also talks some about what tools he uses for his development and more details behind Xdebug's origins and PHP extensions in general.