4 debugging tools for PHP developers

 

Development is not an easy task, there are many languages available for web development but PHP is widely used and considered the easiest scripting language in practice.  The PHP framework developers are constantly adding tools and features to make documentation, optimization, coding , testing, security and debugging process easier and faster for the developers. Without the required tools, it becomes difficult to complete the assigned tasks. The PHP programmers write thousand lines in their code, in these lines of code there may be tons of errors, debugging tools make searching and debugging these errors easier.

 

There are dozens of debugging tools but the famous ones are mentioned below:

 

Xdebug:

Xdebug is a PHP extension which can be integrated into different PHP frameworks to find the bugs in the scripting code. It also provides memory allocation, code coverage,  inspection of code and profiling capabilities. Xdebug has made project development and maintenance  easier for the  developers.

 

PHP Debug:

PHP Debug is also a  valuable open source tool that assists the programmers in debugging code. It can be used to monitor the performance of code and its execution time. It shows the executed SQL queries, dumps the variables in a graphical way and displays the visual output in the framework.

Kint:

Kint is also a powerful and intelligent debugging tool with no-setup. This extension can be easily used with Codeigniter, Symfony, Wordpress, Yii and Zend platform. It detects the kind of data that is dumped and present it in a formated date.It also present the name associated with variables, files, and lines wrapping the fuctions to the developers.

 

Whoops:

It an experienced Library, which helps the developers in handling and debugging the errors. It provides API libraries for exception handling and has support for JSON, AJAX, XML and SOAP. It also provides detailed page errors, exceptions, code view for frames in stack trace and has community support for different platforms.

 

Testing applications is very frustrating for the developers. Contributors have developed different debugging extensions to ease the workflow of PHP development tasks.   With the latest contribution in the PHP language and frameworks, the demand for hiring the PHP developers is increasing in the market.