Note: This article assumes that you have a working Apache/PHP environment running with the latest major version of Netbeans (current 7) installed.

Xdebug is a brilliant PHP extension that provides both debugging and profiling tools. From a basic install it will vastly improve the quality of the error messages but it can also be made to interactively debug scripts using a number of different IDE's. It can also be used as a code profiling tool, but I won't be going into that in this post as that is a little beyond the scope of what I will be talking about.

If you create classes in PHP then you should be unit testing them as much as you can. Setting up unit testing classes for your code can be time consuming and involve a bunch of copying and pasting. Thankfully, PHPUnit comes with a couple of helper functions that allow the creation of unit testing classes automatically, which can save a bit of copying and pasting.

I recently needed to create a function that would read and extract cookies from a Netscape HTTP cookie file. This file is generated by PHP when it runs CURL (with the appropriate options enabled) and can be used in subsequent CURL calls. This file can be read to see what cookies where created after CURL has finished running. As an example, this is the sort of file that might be created during a typical CURL call.

As of Sunday night, the call for papers for PHPNW11 is now closed, so this week the PHPNW team will be sorting out who will be speaking at the conference.

Some of you may have noticed from the PHPNW11 Twitter feed today that blind bird tickets have just gone on sale. Blind bird tickets are so called because they come before the early bird tickets and none of the speakers or sessions have been announced yet.

The PHPNW 2011 conference (aka PHPNW11) information site has just gone live (within the last 4-5 hours) and can be found at conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw11/.