Synopsis
Software development can be a difficult process, full of logic flows, data structures and concepts. Programs such as Moodle are developed by more than one person with their own understanding of the features they’re involved with. As a developer you want to understand how their code works such that you can then ensure that your functionality can interoperate with theirs or improve on what they have achieved, potentially fixing a flaw, a bug. You’re also human and prone to errors, you make mistakes and create flaws, again a ‘bug’ or ‘bugs’. Bugs are detected through testing. The process of bug removal is called ‘debugging’. This can be achieved in many ways: code inspection, additional debugging code that provides additional information that helps to understand what is going on, and the use of a ‘debugger’, an interactive tool that assists the debugging process. As Moodle’s ‘Controller’ element of the ‘Model View Controller’ design pattern ( developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/MVC ) is written in PHP, the for interactive debugging we can use the ‘xDebug’ tool ( xdebug.org ). In this post I’ll describe how you can set it up for yourself.
Link
Post link on eLearningWorld: xDebug .