Software company BlueStatic will be releasing their native Mac debugger, MacGDBp tomorrow (June 18th) to the community.

Here's more information from their press release:

Blue Static today is announcing the release date of MacGDBp, a native Cocoa application that allows Web developers to debug their PHP applications. The tool makes use of the Xdebug (http://www.xdebug.org) PHP extension that provides remote debugging functionality. Blue Static will be releasing the software under the GNU GPL version 2 on the morning of Tuesday, 17 June 2008.

The interface for the application is modeled after the XCode product from Apple to help integrate it more fully into the OS look and feel. It will require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to run and screenshots of the tool can be found here and here.

In a new post on his blog, Guy Harpaz answers a few questions people have been having about the debugger protocol that the PHP IDE project uses.

Debugging a PHP application or a PHP web server requires connectivity between an IDE and a Debugger engine (a PHP module which is installed on the web server). The debug protocol defines this connection. [...] When the Eclipse Foundation approved the PHP IDE project, Zend Studio's debug protocol was opened source and was chosen to be the debug protocol of the PHP IDE project.

He goes through why they made the choice, touches a bit on the security aspect of the two debugging protocols he mentioned (DBGp and Zend Studio's) as well as their common methods for output.