One of the best things about working with ColdFusion is the <cfdump> tag: give it a variable and it will lay out a visual representation of it in nice colours, which makes debugging so much easier and faster than in PHP. Trying to make sense of a four-dimensional array with just a bit of indenting causes brain injury, so dBug is a wonderful addition to the PHP developer’s toolkit. Arrays, objects and resources returned by database queries are all now beautifully readable:

The dBug site says it has been downloaded 26,000 times, which doesn’t seem like a lot given the size of the PHP developer community as a whole; maybe it helps to have used ColdFusion in order to know what you’re missing.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 11:27 am and is filed under coldfusion, php, tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.