Zend Studio ( Commercial ) is Zend Corp’s solution, and someone may like PHPEclipse (Free, based on Eclipse) or PHPed/PHPEdit/Komodo, sth else.

But what’s important for productive code is Debug / Profiling / Code Analysis functions. As you know, Zend Studio provides these function all in one as an intergrated environment, while other editors like PHPEclipse need external debugger to provide these important functions. Xdebug is an almost perfect solution.

FUNCTIONALITY

The Xdebug extension helps you debugging your script by providing a lot of valuable debug information. The debug information that Xdebug can provide includes the following:

• stack and function traces in error messages with:
  • full parameter display for user defined functions
  • function name, file name and line indications
  • support for member functions
• memory allocation
• protection for infinite recursions

Xdebug also provides:

• profiling information for PHP scripts
• script execution analysis
• capabilities to debug your scripts interactively with a debug client

Supported:
VIM (Free): plugin of DBGp client.
Komodo (Commercial): intergrated
PHPEdit: intergrated
PHPEclipse:
net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.xdebug.core, net.sourceforge.phpeclipse.xdebug.ui

You can debug local/remote PHP scripts by configure php.ini on the target environment for these parameters :

remote_host, remote_port, you know how to configure

remote_mode  req/jit,

remote_handler  GDB/DBGp, I suggest DBGp.

Click here to read more docu on configuring Xdebug

In Part.2 I’ll give out an example of installation and configuration from scratch on a Debian/Linux system, and debug client on Windows.