How to debug a web service written in PHP?

Posted by nightcoder on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by nightcoder
Published on 2010-03-17T20:21:51Z Indexed on 2010/03/20 17:21 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 538

Hello,
I've got a nice question here :)

I need to debug my web service written in PHP. Its client is written in C#.
After a couple of days of searching I realized this is not an easy task. At least it seems nobody knows the right solution.

What is the problem in, actually?
We have 2 popular PHP debugging libraries : PHP Debugger from NuSphere and XDebug extension.
The problem is they both are controlled from URL query string or with the help of cookies. For example, to enable debugging with PHP Debugger you need to add ?DBGSESSID=xxx parameter to your URL or to have DBGSESSID cookie.
But when your web service is called from the external client, the client doesn't have a cookie and doesn't add DBGSESSID url parameter. So how can we debug in this situation?

PS. I don't want to write to log files, see request and response headers/data or something like this. I want normal step-by-step debugging and breakpoints.

Anyone?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about web-development

Related posts about web-services