The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I’ve been doing a fair bit of PHP coding lately tying websites into MySQL databases.  One thing that i’ve really come to miss when doing PHP coding is the real-time debugging that you can do with IDEs such as Visual Studio.  I think i’ve gotten spoiled with all of the intellisense and being able to step-into my code and go line by line looking at all the current states of the variables and the execution paths.

I’m using Dreamweaver CS4 to do my web coding and perhaps it has some sort of functionality like this but i’ve yet to find it and the way PHP works I can’t imagine there being a way to do it unless you can run your own local PHP interpreter and monitor it somehow.  Please post a comment if you know of a way to real-time debug PHP instead of having to rely on echoing out debug statements and interpreting PHPs fairly cryptic error messages!

Overall I love getting a web page to work properly and it feels great when I get it done, but along the way it is so much more painful to code things in PHP than in C#.  I know if I was just knocking out an application to link to a database and duplicate the current functionality I have on the website (locally of course) that I could have done it in around 4 hours or so.  The web piece has already taken close to 30 hours to put together.

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