On the local.ch blog today, there's this new post (from Philipp Kelle) showing how to, with the help of geben, easily debug your applications from emacs.

While PHP-developing it sometimes is just too tedious to do those 'add a echo here and there, then reload and search the echoed strings on the screen'-loops. So I searched for a debugger for my favourite editor emacs. After a lengthy install procedure I finally got it running: With geben on emacs you can debug PHP (step through and evaluate expressions).

The post steps you through the installation - adding in xdebug, changing the PHP configuration, and getting and installing geben (along with other required packages).

Troels Knak-Nielsen has posted a script that he's developed (for use in Emacs) to look through a PHP file and pull out all of the classes and functions found inside.

As you probably know, PHP has a ridiculous amount of functions for all kinds of things, and as it happens, token_get_all gives access to the Zend Engine tokenizer. In other words, the same chunk of code, which PHP itself uses, when reading a .php file. This provides an excellent base for writing a script, which can parse the socks off ctags.

The emacs file to bind the editor and the PHP script together is also included, making it as simple to use as binding the function key of your choice to the "php-tokens" script.