Debugging a PHP application can involve quite a bit of machinery, and effort getting that machinery setup. But it's worth it because what alternative is there? <code>echo</code>? Come on!
Thanks to [http://derickrethans.nl/who.html Derick Rethans], xdebug can do a ton of cool things for you. For example, it overloads <code>[https://secure.php.net/var_dump var_dump()]</code> and gives '''you''' [http://www.xdebug.org/docs/display control over how you want deeply nested data structures to be displayed].
Once you have NetBeans and XDebug operating, you can [[CiviCRM/debugging|debug complex applications like CiviCRM]]
== First get Xdebug setup ==