Thread

I’m glad you got everything working Myles. I’m glad the older version worked, I have a different system so can’t speak to why it might be a problem.

I know now that you’ll probably never want to be without a full debugger for PHP/CI. Its amazing what a little break or watch will can do to show you want went wrong - especially in CI, where $this is loaded with so much useful information on the DB, session, etc.

That is so true.  Within 10 minutes of getting this running, and after taking a quick break from exhausting myself with it, I returned back to my project to the first bug to fix and found a flaw in the design that I would never have seen if it wasn’t for trace level debugging.  That, alone, would have taken me hours to find and fix so the payback was instant.

Having come from developing in languages where trace level debugging is assumed (I’m a Delphi & C++ developer before) I just took that for granted.  I can never understand how a developer can be without those sorts of tools and expect to be productive.  Its not that you need them - but without them you are working in the dark.

My concern right now for the PHP/CI/Open Source community like us is how we can compete in the enterprise world with other developers who use closed sourced tools (mainly the MS developers with Visual Studio).  What I am seeing is that my biggest competition in the space that we work in are VB developers who have been given an IDE that they can literally check a box and convert their badly designed & coded GUI app into a badly designed web app.  That is scary stuff.  But they have an IDE that gives them all the capabilities to do this including debugging.  And I have to produce systems at the same pace in order to compete in that space.  My clients want what I do because they want all the freedom and choices of having open source solutions.  But they expect me to be able to produce at the same pace as the other developers who can’t give them the same freedom.  I guess I want to be able to let them ‘have their cake & eat it too’ which I do see as a major competitive advantage for PHP/CI developers.

Anyway I just hope we can try and evangelize all other CI developers into using trace level debugging.  It will produce better systems faster, which ultimately is the reason why we use CI in the first place.

Myles

Its very true, I make a point to try to encourage others to try the tools I was so resistant too myself.

I think the problem is that PHP is so easy to start with, one of its selling points is that you don’t need all that crap. You can get started with Notepad, and upgrading to something like Notepad++ with code highlighting is nice - but not really necessary. Its just so easy to do things you can often start learning and working in PHP before you can even figure out how to install Microsoft tools!

Heck, I never did get ASP.NET installed on my work computer (I’m responsible for a site built in basic ASP). It was such a mess of updates and dependencies, I gave up and uninstalled it all and had to reinstall my development server because IIS installed even though I didn’t want it.

However, this simplicity to start must gradually grow, and slowly but surely an IDE becomes a better and better value. When I start with PHP though, there was no such thing as frameworks or even an IDE for PHP, and I don’t think XDebug even existed - or if it did no one spoke of it.

As you use a framework your power to be productive increases, but so does complexity. Without a tool to manage this increase in complexity you will lose a great deal of profit you could have gained from the switch-over to better ways of working.

I think knowledge is power here, as is sincerity and clarity in the value of spending a little time to get started with an IDE and debugger. Further, making it easier to get these programs up and running and XAMPP, etc, shipping with XDEBUG by default make things better and better.

You don’t want to insist on using any given set of tools, as every tool has its own learning curve and I’d never have switched to CI if I was required to learn an IDE and install a debugger - but we must all strive to keep learning and teaching, and to not get too comfortable with the way we do things now and entirely miss whole new levels of improvements that are available to us.

Right on, brother!  😊

I’ve worked in development environments before that were complete ‘RAD’ tools designed at non-developers, that due to platform monopoly or lack of options, became the gold standard for development languages in their areas.  I’ve inherited code from non-developers who eventually thought they were developers.  Boy, were they wrong.  Complexity in systems is like clothes in a closet.  You never thought you’d fill up your closet, but given the space you will fill it up.

Developing a small website is one thing.  Developing enterprise class applications for the cloud (as we do) that are designed to be ‘GUI replacements’ is an entirely different animal.  This is the future growth area for CI/PHP developers, but we need tools to allow this to happen quickly and despite a lot of hard core PHP developers hanging onto Notepad or VI for sheer life, the fact is that they might be comfortable with rudimentary tools, but they won’t be able to compete with a lesser developer but a better IDE toolset in the future.  The IDEs are starting to get smarter (or at least are wanting to) so that anyone’s Mom (and nothing against Moms here because many of us have programmers for mothers…) could develop a full featured web application.  That’s scary, but its been the goal of IDE builders for decades.  MS seem to have gotten closer to that than anyone else, but you have to swallow the poison pill of IIS, MS SQL Server, Windoze Server, etc. to play in that camp.  Bring the checkbook along with you and good luck.

Myles

PHP developers hanging onto Notepad or VI for sheer life

With all due respect but I wouldn’t group the VI users in with the Notepad users…

Most VI users I know don’t see the point in an IDE and they are usually right 😉

PHP developers hanging onto Notepad or VI for sheer life

With all due respect but I wouldn’t group the VI users in with the Notepad users…

Yeh, you are probably right.  I wrote some pretty big C code in the 1980s with VI & Make, so you have a point.  But given the complexity requirements these days, I’d be scared to death to take on a project just with those tools now.

However the essence of my post is more that the ‘sweet spot’ is a good developer with good tools.  Not a good developer with bad tools, or a bad developer with good tools.  But hey - if you can create an application that rivals a big enterprise class GUI desktop app with VI in PHP/CI, all power to ya.  Tell the world the secret, and I’m sure we’ll all listen.

Myles

Just a quick update…

I recently switched my desktop PC environment entirely over to Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (kicking myself for not doing this earlier) and in the process installed the latest Netbeans 6.8 with PHP 5.2.9.  Had to install xDebug from scratch again.

Well despite the issues I was having with Netbeans 6.8/xDebug on Windows, NONE of those issues have surfaced at all with the Linux version.  Its working absolutely perfectly, so I’m stoked.  Finally I have the latest Netbeans (which is a joy to use BTW), a secure and fast desktop OS and I’m writing & debugging away.  Highly recommend this setup.

Myles

It also does inline syntax warning, has SVN support integrated, does CodeIgniter intellisense, CodeIgniter code highlighting, CodeIgniter autocompletions, has templates so you don’t have to build ‘every Controller, method and view’ by hand but just let Netbeans create them for you and programmable shortkeys which I use a lot.

This means that when I type:

db
md
vw

and press ‘TAB’ it changes this to:

$this->db->
$this->load->model(_)
$this->load->view(_);

 

How did you set up all that? I couldn’t figure it out, I’ve been using netbeans for a while too but so tired of typing $this->db etc… all the time lol

Thanks!

There is only one real debugger: xdebug

There are whole bunch of different IDE’s that can be used with Xdebug.
As I’m a big fan of notepad++ - I use dbgp plugin for Notepad++ with Xdebug
for php debugging.

As for [removed] firebug is IMHo the best