The TutsPlus.com site continues their "Programming with Yii2" series of tutorials with the latest edition in the series, a look at using the Yii2 debugger to help track down issues in your code.

In today's tutorial, I'll show you how to install the Yii2 Debugger, and we'll explore its capabilities in detail. It's a powerful programming assistant which is often underutilized.

As you code and test your application, the debugger can show you your application path, queries and query variables, performance characteristics, server and framework settings, and much more.

The article starts off by showing you how to install the "yiisoft/yii2-debug" library (via Composer) and enable it in the "debug" section of your configuration. With it correctly installed you'll then be able to access it at the bottom of your pages. The debug console provides plenty of helpful information related to:

• the route matched
• a log of actions and events
• load time
• memory used
• database queries performed

...among others. The tutorial walks you through these and other pieces of information the tool provides with screenshots of example output for each.

In this tutorial to the stfalcon.com site Sasha Lensky talks about some things you can do to help boost the performance of your Symfony2 application with a few tweaks in how Doctrine is used.

I have been trying to write this article for a long time, but just couldn’t get around. Finally, I pulled myself together and did it. So, what will we discus ... I will share some techniques about working with Doctrine2 ORM, which will help to improve the site performance on Symfony2 (precisely any site that uses Doctrine2 ORM). I have created a project and put it on GitHub as a visual guide, so anyone can test my words in action now.

He shares five tips and includes code examples and results (based on the Profiler toolbar) for each:

• Downloading all necessary connections
• Updating multiple entities by request
• Hydration waiver
• Using Reference Proxies
• Using Symfony Profiler Toolbar

That final tip about the Profiler toolbar is actually one used in the rest of the examples too, showing how to get that other information from the tool.

The Laravel News site has a post introducing a tool you can use in your Laravel applications to help debug issues and performance, the Laravel Debug Bar.

The Laravel Debugbar by Barry vd. Heuvel is a package that allows you to quickly and easily keep tabs on your application during development. With a simple installation and powerful features the Debugbar package is one of the cornerstone packages for Laravel. The debugbar is already updated for Laravel 5 and I wanted to show you all the great features it includes.

The post includes instructions to get the debugbar installed (via Composer) and add it to your Laravel providers list. They walk through the basics of its features and screenshots of each. He also links you to the project documentation to provide more detail on each of the features.

In the latest to his site Matthew Setter takes a look at easy routing with RouteMatch in Zend Framework 2 applications. The RouteMatch component gives you better control over your routing and lets you define "match paths" for URL to Controller mappings.

Today using Zend Framework 2 RouteMatch, Router and Request objects, I show you an easy way to dynamically update the current route. It’s almost painlessly simple. [...] Well, like most things in web application development, what starts out simply in the beginner often grows more complex over time. So too is my once simple route.

His "simple" route started getting a bit out of control when he added in some pagination to the page (and query for the path match). He wanted to figure out how to re-render data with the same filters but show the next page of data. He shows how to use the RouteMatch component to achieve just this. He creates a custom module with a "listViewToolbar" helper that lets you read the router, request and handle the parameters sent via the URL. The "invoke" method is called to render the toolbar in the page, complete with the new settings.

On the phpDevelopment blog today Anderi Gabreanu has posted the second part in this Zend Framework tutorial series with a look at how to successfully debug your application with the help of the ZFDebug Toolbar.

Continuing with the tutorial series, we will see how to debug the application. Debugging include easy to use methods of printing data on the screen, including ZFDebug Toolbar in order to manage all errors and queries, using the logger to log messages to Firebug, using a simple debug function that will place debug messages in your ZFDebug Toolbar, in a special Debug panel, using a redirect debug function in order to see what is happening during your requests, using redirect in a Controller plugin.

He shows how to set up your index file (front controller) to make the ZFDebug toolbar work with your application and how to relay messages back out for your to view.

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.

In a new post to his blog today Johannes Schluter talks about a plugin for the NetBeans IDE that allows you to run tests for PHP's regression test suite right in the editor.

The test system therefore produces a bunch of files, a file containing the expected output, one containing the actual output and a diff between these as relevant files. The problem there is that the diff, for being portable, is using a quite simple mechanism which only shows the lines which differ without any context.

[...] Lately I've changed my way of working and use vim less, I still use it, but I use NetBeans as an IDE more and more. So I thought a bit about that test issue and searched my brain for my Java skills and started playing around to see whether I manage to write a NetBeans plugin which can run the tests and report the results in a usable way.

Hes created a project for the plugin (where you can download the latest version - 0.6.0) and install it to your local IDE copy. It adds a toolbar icon, asks for the location of the binaries to test and runs the diff quickly and easily. You can see a screenshot of the tool in action here.

The Symfony blog points out a handy feature included with the latest release of the framework - a web debugging toolbar that gives you a quick summary of the stats for the current page.

The symfony web debug toolbar is one of the developer best friend. It is always conveniently accessible in the browser when using the development environment. It gives you everything you need to know about the current page and ease the debugging of your applications. Until now, all the information available in this toolbar were hardcoded. But as of symfony 1.2, the web debug toolbar is entirely configurable.

The toolbar contains information like: the version of the framework you're using, cache information, logging, memory usage and the execution time of the page. They also include a bit on how to customize your toolbar, adding and removing panels from the bar as well as changing up the look with styles.

The Zend Developer Zone has a bonus episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series posted, a different sort of episode - it's a video podcast as hosted by Davey Shafik and covering the combination of Ajax and PHP (and debugging all along the way).

Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. An avid author for both magazines and books author, Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from a unique perspective. Today Davey is going to show us how to debug Ajax applications using Firebug and the Zend Developer toolbar.

You can grab the video [mov] directly from the ZDZ site or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great podcasts.

The Zend Developer Zone has a bonus episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series posted, a different sort of episode - it's a video podcast as hosted by Davey Shafik and covering the combination of Ajax and PHP (and debugging all along the way).

Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. An avid author for both magazines and books author, Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from a unique perspective. Today Davey is going to show us how to debug Ajax applications using Firebug and the Zend Developer toolbar.

You can grab the video [mov] directly from the ZDZ site or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great podcasts.