DBG Support???

cseymour@seyware.com · Mon May 23, 2005 6:13 pm

Hello,
Do your products allow for DBG integration for debugging PHP scripts?

Thanks.

Chris

Post by **Karlis** » Wed May 25, 2005 1:18 pm

The developers of DBG provide no support and no developer help for using their tools, thus we are not able to support them. If somebody can get them to disclose details on using DBG from Delphi applications I would appreciate that.

zmodem · Post by **zmodem** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 10:49 pm

I would like to see this feature too, so I did some searching. And you're right, there isn't any documentation! :/

I did find this though: http://support.nusphere.com/viewtopic.p ... ght=delphi

You can access it through the COM interface.

Also, PHPEdit, which makes use of DBG and is written in Delphi, is GPL'd open source. Because it's GPL'd, you can't include the source in your program, but maybe you could sneek a peek to get an idea of how it works, then write your own code. I'm not sure if that's legal because it's kinda a fine line..... but... *shrug*

Thanks!

Post by **Karlis** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:17 pm

Where do I get the source of PHPEdit?

zmodem · Post by **zmodem** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:31 pm

I guess I should have done my homework a little better. My apologies

I KNOW it was free, and I THOUGHT it was open source, but as of right now, neither is true. They changed their company and took it commercial. No source available.

I'll keep looking though...

Thanks!

mwb1100 · Post by **mwb1100** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 2:12 am

admin wrote:Where do I get the source of PHPEdit?

You can get the source for PHPEdit 0.8, which was released under the opensource QPL license here:

http://www.waterproof.fr/action.php?id= ... rce&file=1

I assume that after the 0.8 release, the license was changed to non-opensource.

It appears to have support for the DBG interface in tools/dbg.

flz · Post by **flz** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 9:19 am

Since there is no documentation, and since dbg is publicly available in older versions only (the new versions are only used by PHPEd), maybe xdebug would be an alternative?

zmodem · Post by **zmodem** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 10:52 pm

Yeah, I looked at the xdebug website the other night. They have some pretty extensive documentation.

http://xdebug.org

Thanks

Post by **Karlis** » Fri Jul 15, 2005 12:07 am

Thanks for this info. There is certainly lots of materials to be examined. Please feel free to add additional information / links on this topic.

We will be considering to include the debugger in the next major release of the product.

flz · Post by **flz** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 11:07 am

There is also an opensource debugger called gubed at http://gubed.mccabe.nu. This one is interesting because it doesn't need to be installed, it's not a PHP-Module but PHP-scripts so you can just copy it to the webserver. It's integrated into quanta plus (which is gpl). Quanta has an interesting approach: they have a general debug plugin system so different plugins could be written.

What i personally would care for is remote debugging, so when debugging, a browser page opens and you can see the output of the webserver in the browser page. In the editor, all included PHP-files open automatically. When a link is clicked in the browser window, the new page is debugged as well. The browser window handles sessions, cookies, javascript, forms etc.. This browser window does not have to reside inside the editor, i think it's even better if you can open the page in your main browser. I think this is less confusing because you have the usual environment to view the page, and in the editor the code is always visible.

I'm looking forward to the next major release. A debugger would really be nice!

Post by **Karlis** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 7:19 pm

flz,

I'll take a look at the debuger, however what you descibed 9runing pages in an external browser, e.g. Internet Explorer or Mozilla) while debugging with the editor is not quite possible as the editor can not talk to Mozilla or Internet Explorer at least not by the technology currently used. In the best case (if we manage to implement the debugger) it would be possible to run scripts in the editors' internal preview window.

flz · Post by **flz** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 3:11 pm

Thank you for the infos. About running scripts in an external browser, the debugging client doesn't necessarily have to talk to the browser window, it can communicate with the debug server, and the browser gives the debug command to the debug server, which is located at the webserver.

For example with the gubed debugger, which consists of php-scripts there are two ways to achieve this:
- including a special gubed script in the page to be debugged.
- passing the script to be debugged as a parameter to gubed.
The debug server then tries to establish a connection to the debug client, starts a debug session and sends the output to the browser. A plugin for firefox exists, which automatically does the task of rewriting the urls (didn't try this yet).

With xdebug, it's more easy because xdebug is installed as a module on the webserver, so you can give the command to start a debug session via a special parameter (?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=user) attached to the script you want to debug. The command is then stored in a cookie so subsequent pages are also debugged.

There is an editor which uses remote debugging with xdebug, however i didn't get it to run smoothly, i can't tell whether this was the editors, xdebugs or my own fault. With the gubed debugger remote debugging works well (as far as i can see), as the gubed client doesn't have an internal preview window, this is the only way to run gubed anyway.