Pablo Viquez has a new post to his site today showing you how to debug your PHP code with the help of JMeter (an Apache project) that tests functional behavior and performance and the Zend Debugger.

Now, I think JMeter is awesome, no doubt about it, however what if I want to test something while developing a new API Endpoint? well I used to be accustom to the nasty var_dump(); exit; combination or if the API was already completed I used to do error_log() everywhere and figure out the results. [...] I love the easy integration that Zend Server has with Zend Studio for debugging and I though to myself, why not just change the client that triggers the debugging console so instead of the browser use JMeter, at the end both uses HTTP so it should work, well guess what, IT DOES, and It's awesome. No more print_r, error_log, var_dump in the API, lets do the Step by Step debugging with JMeter!

He walks you through the steps needed to get it all set up and working together, complete with screenshots. Really, you can use whatever debugger setup you prefer (with something like Xdebug) and have jMeter execute on top of that - there's no interface directly between the debugger and jMeter.

Kevin Schroeder has a quick new post with a one-liner you can use to get remote debugging working with Zend Debugger and PHPUnit.

I’m trying to do some remote debugging with PHPUnit on a remote system. I was following the rules I had written about in a previous article but for some reason I could not get path mapping to work. So I figured I’d ping the Studio lead developer because as soon as I did that I’d get it to work. Well, that’s what happened.

His fix comes in the form of setting a command-line parameter, QUERY_STRING, with the correct parameter order so the paths will get mapped back to the correct project. This parameter is a URL-encoded set of parameters that do things like start the debugging, set up the hostname for the debugger to point to and map the "original URL" back to your choice of values.

On the XPertDeveloper.com blog today there's a new post sharing four handy debugging tools you can use to make finding those elusive problems in your code simpler.

PHP is very well used scripting language in now a days. But PHP does not have any inbuilt debugging tools or extension. But we have some extensions and tools available which serves the debugging purpose of the PHP.

The tools on their list involve both the backend and frontend:

• XDebug
• Zend Debugger
• FirePHP
• PHP Console

Stefan Esser has released a patch, pulled originally from the Suhosin project's functionality, that allows you to use a bit of stealth for run the Zend Debugger and XDebug at the same time.

Those asking usually can understand why running two debuggers at the same time will lead to problems, but they don't understand why problems should arise when only one is used at a time. They want to be able to load Zend Debugger and Xdebug with the same php.ini without the need to restart the whole server just to change the debugger.

You can grab the patch from his site and install it like normal. With the patch, your PHP install will handle the rest behind the scenes.

To compliment his vidcast on the Zend Developer Zone, Davey Shafik has a few more helpful notes posted to his blog on debugging with Firebug.

Cal Evans at the Zend DevZone just posted my screencast on AJAX and PHP End-to-End Debugging. I mentioned in the screencast that I you could find some information on my blog that is used in the video, so this is that post.

He points out another quick method for debugging an ajax application (as mentioned by Greg Beaver) - adding the GET request values directly to the query string inside the Javascript of your application.

To compliment his vidcast on the Zend Developer Zone, Davey Shafik has a few more helpful notes posted to his blog on debugging with Firebug.

Cal Evans at the Zend DevZone just posted my screencast on AJAX and PHP End-to-End Debugging. I mentioned in the screencast that I you could find some information on my blog that is used in the video, so this is that post.

He points out another quick method for debugging an ajax application (as mentioned by Greg Beaver) - adding the GET request values directly to the query string inside the Javascript of your application.