Derick Rethans

About the speaker:
Derick Rethans has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the Xdebug debugging tool, the mcrypt, date and input-filter extensions, bug fixes, additions and leading the QA team. He’s a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming. Derick works as an independent contractor doing various PHP related jobs while focussing on internals and extensions. In his spare time he likes to travel, hike, ski and practise photography.

Track: PHP

Presentation title: Debugging PHP with XDebug

Abstract:
This session teaches you how to detect and debug PHP scripts with the free open source tool Xdebug, which is an extension to PHP. The first part will quickly show how to get started with Xdebug. The second part of the session will cover detecting problems in your scripts by showing how Xdebug provides debugging aides in the form of stack/function traces, dumps of variables, modified PHP functions. In the last part I will show the remote debugger capabilities of Xdebug with different IDEs, where you can: set breakpoints on functions, methods and file/line combinations and evaluating error messages. On top of this you will also see how you can use Xdebug’s profiler to find bottlenecks in your applications.