PHP_Debug & Smarty

The new release of the PEAR::PHP_Debug library provides a great way to debug and monitor the state of your PHP application.  The floating DIV tag provides a quick and easy way to view the PHP variables and to examine your own vars and log messages.  In addition it provides access to the PHP Error messages that often get missed unless you examine the PHP error log frequently.

 Loïc Vernet  (the project lead) has done a great job with 1.0.0RC1 and I’m sure it’s gonna go from strength to strength.  I’d love to see the addition of creating your own top level groups to the toolbar (in addition to those existing already) and to be able to expand and add to the items in Vars & Config.

 If you’re a Smarty user then you’re used to using the Smarty debug console to examine the state of the template engine but the extra popup window can sometimes get annoying – so with the release of PHP_Debug I took the time to combine the output from the PHP_Debug window with the friendly in-browser display of PHP_Debug.

 The result can be found here on the Smarty Forums – version 0.1 isn’t exactly elegant – currently I’m struggling to find a better approach to integrate the 2 without making some core changes to Smarty. 

Stay tuned – I have a couple of ideas in the pipe to solve the problem…