In a new blog entry today, David Coallier has posted about two new offerings that are in the works for a web-based frontend to XDebug:

For quite a while in the PHP Community (And even myself) I have heard people asking about either an online tool to work on cachegrind output files or a cross platform tool that would have the ability to do what KCacheGrind does on Linux but for Windows and OSX.

He mentions the origin of the idea for a cachegrind app as a part of the Google Summer of Code (that did get accepted and will be worked on by Chung-Yang Lee). The other, Webgrind is an independent project from the other but looks equally as promising.

Check out Vinu Thomas' thoughts on the matter too.

Andreas Gohr has a new blog post today that talks about a way to really get to know your code better - use XDebug to see it from the inside out.

Xdebug is a PHP extension which helps you to understand, debug and profile PHP. It can help you to find bottlenecks or give you an quick overview what happens in code you aren't familiar with, yet.

The post gives a brief overview of the installation of the extension (building a shared module) and shows how to get started with profiling an application. He talks about the cachegrind tool you can use to parse the results and the kcachegrind app that will make the results a bit more visual.

As a bonus, he also throws in a bit about function tracing - picking out each small bit of functionality in the code (the function/methods) and gathering stats for each.