I presented some features of XDebug at the February PHP User Group meeting, which we discovered is 5 days away from our “10 year birthday” of the group! If I had realized it earlier, I would have brought a cake!

I talked about installing XDebug, which was sort of a pain at first since this was the first time I installed a PECL module. With debian/ubuntu I found I had to have make, build-essentials, php5-dev (or php4-dev) from the software repository for my linux distribution and of course, Pear needed to be installed. Then I was able to do “pecl install xdebug-beta” and it would install, so it was not so hard once you had the linux stuff installed. Then I had to put “extension=xdebug.so” in my php.ini file. Then, you had to go about adding a config section in your php.ini to turn on the features of XDebug you want to use – debugging (things like glorified var_dump), profiling, and working with a debugging server.

I showed a few of the debugging features like the var_dump like functions, but i mainly focused on profiling and looking at the results both in WinCacheGrinde (windoze) and kCacheGrind (linux). I compared a PHP4 script using pear’s xmlserializer class and PHP5 using the built-in xml extension. The differences were quite noticeable and I may write up something in detail on this at a later time.

Then Rich, the group leader, stole Rasmus’s talk about Getting Rich with PHP5 and showed the slides and talked about how Rasmus used a similar profiling tool and was able to increasingly narrow down the number of servers needed for a particular application. Profiling is a great way to see what parts of your application are worth optimizing. The slides showed output from a different, but similar tool to what I demonstrated and the two talks were great together!

Then, we come to the fun part.. the random sharing of knowledge… I give a very brief demo of selenium before most people got there… I showed the glories of using VMWare player to use one of the ready-made ubuntu machines out there… we talked about Drupal … opensource .. a bit about upcoming PHP-Tek … it was a good time :)

Rich asked for volunteers for helping with the website — any takers? :)