Kjartan Mannes

Scott over wants better debugging tools in PHP 5. I agree. For a language that boasts making web development easy the debugging tools are uncessary complex. The recent discussion on var_dump_html doesn't give me much hope this will change. Using error log for tracking errors works for me, but I'm not about to var_dump every variable to debug on every error. It is not simple to decide which variables are worth dumping on every error, in addition PHP is notorious for not giving errors where the error happens. Maybe it is time for me to use a proper IDE for PHP development with debuging builting...
In the comments Tim Parkin has this to say about the Zend IDE:

I personally use Zend IDE and it's been a god send when you get stuck or are tracing exteremly complicated behaviour (complex recursive parsing engines). It's freindly if a little jerky (it's in java so garbage collecting can happen in the middle of typing a sentence which means a 1-2 second hang, you get used to it though).

I had to smile at that. 1-2 second hang is acceptable? That pretty much sums up why I don't use Java applications. 5 years ago I might have accepted it, but in days with gigahertz processors this is unacceptable.