At work, I write ColdFusion, at home I write PHP. I bounce back and forth between worlds. Jack of all trades, master of none I guess.

One thing that I have always loved about ColdFusion is the cfdump tag. You feed it any variable, and it will spit out whats in it. Struct, String, Array, Query, Object, XML, it doesnt matter, it just works. I would go as far to say that its one of the best native debugging resources I have ever seen in a web development language.

In PHP, you can do a print_r() and look at the source, but that is no where as cool as cfdump. I have longed for a cfdump style resource to be available in PHP. Today I got my wish when I stumbled upon “dBug”. http://dbug.ospinto.com

dBug is a small PHP class that duplicates the cfdump tag from ColdFusion

look how simple it is to use:

include_once("dBug.php");
new dBug($myVariable);


The output looks like this:

dBug will handle anything you throw at it, just like cfdump does. This is going to help me so much in the future. If you develop in PHP, I think that this class is a must have in your tool kit.

dBug is free! get it today from http://dbug.ospinto.com