Derick Rethans has posted about some new browser extensions for the popular PHP-based debugger Xdebug. These are to replace the helper that is no longer available on FireFox's site (download).

Years ago I wrote about a Firefox extension that allows you to start an Xdebug debugging session by clicking on an icon in Firefox' status bar. For some unexplained reason, this extension is no longer available through Firefox' addon-site. [...] There are now a few other browser extensions that do the same thing.

He lists three new extensions that can most of what you'd need to keep your testing going - easy Xdebug, Xdebug enabler (for Chrome) and this blog post with a pure Javascript method done with bookmarklets.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post following up on the previous article about the FireSymfony debugging plugin. Previously, they introduced the tool - this time they look at the actual installation and configuration.

In the previous post we went through the features provided by FireSymfony. In this post we are going to see how to install the Firefox Add On and the symfony plugin.

Installing the Symfony plugin is simple - a standard plugin:install command and a bit of tweaking on the factories.yml file to add it to the logging settings. The FireFox extension installs like normal - grab it from here and install like any other extension.

In this new post to his blog, Sameer shows how you can push content with the xpi content type out from your PHP scripts (for things like a Firefox toolbar/extension).

A couple of days back I created a Firefox toolbar for my blog as an experiment in learning XUL. Once installed on my blog I wanted Firefox to recognize it as an addon and install it rather than displaying a 'save/open' dialog.

Since his hosting provider (GoDaddy) didn't seem to work with adding it into an .htaccess file (an AddType for Apache), he had to force the download type with a few calls to header with the right content type, file size and file name to push it to the user.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has taken a look at how big the PHP market is - how many developers there are and what kind of tools those developers might be using.

Even knowing that only a fraction of the PHP developers in the world will come to a given PHP event, the more PHP developers there are, greater is the chance to have more developers coming to the event. Therefore the first big question is: how large is the PHP developer community world wide? This is a difficult question. Zend has been publishing rough estimates of the number of PHP developers that exist in the world.

According to some estimates, there's over five million PHP developers out there. The PHPClasses site has this tool that can help show the distribution of some of these in user groups. Manuel also shares some stats he's gathered off of his site - a growing trend for visitors to use Linux and OSX as compared to Windows and the predominance for developers to use Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Other tools mentioned include FirePHP, a Javascript Debugger.

In this new post Juozas Kaziukenas takes a look at a very useful debugging tool that can help keep your debug messages and errors out of your page and into a proper debugger - FirePHP (an extension of Firebug).

One may debug his application with print(") statements all other the place or alert(") for JavaScript. Luckily some years ago Firebug extension for Firefox was introduced, which introduced (?) console. Console works absolutely the same as in Linux and can be used not only to execute commands, but receive information from various sources.

He shows what the output looks like both on the interface side (in the Firefox plugin) and in the HTTP headers that are sent back along with the web server's response. Some frameworks even have components that let you interface with it directly.

NETTUTS.com has posted their top ten list of some of the largest milestones in web development - one of which is the release of PHP.

Some believe the progression of the great World Wide Web to be a travesty, others a godsend. Regardless, the Internet has evolved over the past few decades, and is in many ways better for the web developer. New technologies have come about that have made web development much easier to get started in, and ultimately more fun.

Here's a few from their list:

• Linus Torvalds Creates the Linux Kernel
• The Open Source Movement Officially Starts
• PayPal is Founded
• Firefox is Released
• and, of course, PHP is Released by Rasmus Lerdorf

Ivan Guardado has posted a recent tutorial looking at debugging your PHP code with the help of a popular tool - FirePHP (that interfaces with an equally popular Firefox extension, Firebug).

Nowadays, the code debugger is a tool that has almost all programing environments which allows you to watch the internal work of your applications and finding errors at run time for a easy way. The trouble is when you are working in a client-server architecture model, because from where you send the request (client) can not access the code hosted on the server.

He points out FirePHP as one that doesn't require this sort of installation. Included is a quick tutorial on getting it up and running for your development environment as well as the output formats and how to handle the output you want for debugging only.

On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta offers some suggestions of resources and methods for learning how to use regular expressions in your PHP applications.

When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start.

He points you first in the direction of the preg_* functions then towards a few examples (like with mod_rewrite) and tools to help you understand how things match, like the regex tested extension for firefox and the regular expression cheat sheet on AddedBytes.com.

Evert Pot has posted a handy tip for Firefox users when it comes to searching the PHP.net manual for a specific function - an addition to the Quicksearch.

If you're a PHP developer, you'll likely often need to open up php.net to find out the [the order of ;)] arguments for a function. Generally i just type, php.net/functionname, but if you want to save 4 more keystrokes you can easily add a quick search.

He's included a screenshot of the interface to add it as well as the location to give - a URL pointing to the search page on the php.net website that looks in the "quickref" category for a match.

Davey Shafik has shared a method he's come up with for debugging directly from Firefox with the help of xdebug and the Komodo IDE.

In an effort to switch away from Zend Studio I have been trying out Komodo (again) [...] One of the last barriers to switching, has been to emulate the Zend Studio Toolbar for Firefox (also available for IE) which lets you do lots of great things, from Profiling to Debugging every page. I personally use it mostly for debugging single pages, and forms, as well as for end to end PHP and AJAX debugging - so this was the feature I was mostly looking to emulate.

He found his way through a few small additions to his php.ini file that allow Komodo to connect directly to the remote server and make debugging as easy as adding "?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1" to the URL of whatever page you're on. He's also made a bookmarklet that turns it on for you as well.