PHP Freaks

If you read my recent tutorial on the use of the excellent XDebug profiler, you may be aware of what a truly a great FOSS PHP extension it is, used by countless developers over the years. Unfortunately the cachegrind format is not quite right, because when XDebug was developed Derick Rethans had no documentation of the format and had to reverse engineer it and make some educated guesses. Derick is truly one of the PHP communities heroes, and taught many of us about PHP's internals through his articles, and projects like XDebug and Vulcan.

Without a doubt Derick has donated untold hours of his time into these projects, and as an independent consultant, many people would like to see Derick be able to use his talents to improve these tools, but he also has to be able to pay his rent and eat.

Quite frankly, as PHP changes, it is a huge burden to make the updates needed for a tool like XDebug. Sebastian Bergmann, the developer of phpUnit suggested to Derick that he experiment with Pledgie and he has a project to update XDebug's profiler code so that it works properly with the latest version of KCachegrind. If you use XDebug, or think you might use it someday, or just use other features of XDebug, I urge you to follow the lead of those who have already donated and got us 70% to the goal, and let's get Derick underways in updating this amazing tool. It's already over 72% funded, and this is a great way to give back to someone who has done so much for the PHP community in the past. Click or goto http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14641 [http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14641]