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.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the language we all know and love (or love to hate) - PHP. Rasmus Lerdorf started the language to "scratch an itch" he needed to make a more dynamic web site. It's grown over the last twenty years into one of the most popular web programming languages. Several members of the PHP community have posted some of their own thoughts about the event:

• Joe Watkins
• Cal Evans
• Chris Hartjes
• Stephan Hochdorfer
• Pascal Martin
• Ben Ramsey
• Davey Shafik
• Anderson Casimiro
• Mark Railton
• AWS PHP SDK Blog
• Amanda Folson
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Anderson Casimiro
• Chris Tankersley
• Shameer C
• Tudor Barbu
• Erika Heidi
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• David Carr
• Rafael Dohms
• Derick Rethans
• Wim Godden
• Christian Wenz
• Oscar Merida
• Patrick Stephan
• Rob Allen
• Matthew Setter
• Matt Raines
• Justin Carmony
• Sherif Ramadan
• thePHP.cc
• Laravel News
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Jordi Boggiano

Also, be sure to check out Ben Ramsey's article on Infoworld too! Have you shared your own thoughts about today? Let us know and we'll add it to the list! Also be sure yo check out everyone that tagged their tweets too!

There's some major news from the Symfony project (with matching post on their blog) worth celebrating - the framework and project are celebrating nine years since the first commits were made by Fabien Potencier himself.

Where does the time go? This milestone reminds us all of how Symfony has become an important part of our professional lives and been changing the way we work with code for almost a decade! (We won’t even talk about the whole "we’re all getting older" thing!) [...] Over the last several years, the Symfony project has completely and continually reinvented itself. Originally a pure MVC framework with some auto-magical features, now it's both a set of decoupled components and a full-stack Request-Response framework backed by a vast development community.

They also talk some about the Symfony community and include a special thanks to all of the developers that have contributed their talents, both in code and documentation, to the framework over the years.

On the Engine Yard blog Davey Shafik has a new post celebrating ten years of PHP 5 as of July 13th, 2014:

Ten years ago yesterday on July 13th 2004, PHP 5.0.0 was unleashed onto the world. Bringing with it the Zend Engine 2, effectively a brand new PHP. [...] The truth is that until PHP 5, PHP was a mostly procedural language, while it supported classes and objects, they were a bolt-on feature. This history is still visible in the majority of its default feature set even today — including some of its newest additions like the new password hashing API.

He talks about the evolution of PHP even since version 5.0.0 and how other technologies, like Ruby on Rails, has influenced the language and its developers towards greater things. He shares his answers to a few questions including:

What is the most significant change to PHP in the last 10 years?
• What's the biggest change in the community in the last 10 years?
• What's the most pressing issue for PHP?
• What would you like to see in the next major version?

He also includes an infographic of the timeline that lead up to the PHP 5.0.0 release and the advancements since then. There's even a look at the "Future of PHP" with some emerging technologies and what might lie in store for "PHP 6" (whatever that may end up being).

Netcraft.com has posted the results of a web server survey with data compiled starting in 2002 all the way up to 2012 about the growth and usage of PHP on the web. The title of the article, "PHP just grows & grows", gives a clue to their findings.

Netcraft began its Web Server Survey in 1995 and has tracked the deployment of a wide range of scripting technologies across the web since 2001. One such technology is PHP, which Netcraft presently finds on well over 200 million websites.

For those not familiar with the language, they give an overview of its history starting back with PHP v1 that Rasmus Lerdorf developed for his own uses. They move quickly through the years talking about versions and improvements made during their lifecycle. They also talk some about their own tracking methods and the metrics they use to measure PHP's growth - hostnames serving up PHP-based sites, removal of active (not spam) sites, unique IPs and actual computers/machines.

Congratulations go out to Derick Rethans for the outstanding work he's done on XDebug for the last ten years. From his latest blog post:

Today it has been ten years since the first release of Xdebug: version 0.7.0. I would like to celebrate this tenth anniversary with a new release: Xdebug 2.2.0. Xdebug 2.2 adds support for PHP 5.4 and provides some new features.

There's five new things on his list of updates in this latest release:

• Colours on the command line
• Better support for closures in stack and function traces
• The size of arrays is now shown with the overloaded variable output
• Added the method call type to xdebug_get_function_stack
• Extra information to error printouts to tell that the error suppression operator has been ignored due to xdebug.scream

If you've found XDebug handy for testing and finding those tough to track bugs over the years, you should consider buying "support" to show Derick your appreciation (oh, and you also get a "first in" preference on your XDebug questions)!