The PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in, when installed with Eclipse Europa, gives you that ability to quickly write and debug PHP scripts and pages. PDT supports two debugging tools: XDebug and the Zend Debugger. Learn how to configure PDT for debugging PHP scripts and discover which perspectives you use when taking closer looks at your scripts.

This tutorial demonstrates how to configure the PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in for Eclipse to debug your PHP scripts. It also introduces the perspectives you’ll use (namely, PHP Debug) when taking closer looks at your PHP scripts.

Objectives
After completing this tutorial, you’ll be able to set up either XDebug — an open source project that allows you to debug executable scripts and scripts running on a Web server — or the Zend Debugger in Eclipse using the PDT project to develop PHP applications. You’ll understand the various parts of the PDT project’s PHP Debug perspective and learn how to set up, view, and work with breakpoints. You also learn how to inspect the values of variables as you are stepping through the code, as well as how to debug PHP Web applications on your local server so you can run through your PHP Web application with the debugger.

Prerequisites
To get the most out of this tutorial, you should have done a bit of PHP development. But what matters more is that you’ve done software development in general. You’ll understand the debugging concepts better if you’re familiar with debugging any other language. I wrote this to be helpful to those who are fairly new to Eclipse, rather than to those who have been using Eclipse for a while.

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