WOW CFdump in php!

I’m always in between both worlds (coldfusion & php). I must say I absolutely do love Coldfusion. A lot of people knock Cold Fusion, but let me tell you how much easier it is to write scripts with it. Mind you, this discussion can go either way. For what I do, Coldfusion makes my life a lot easier. It’s as simple as just writing <cfoutput> around your data to display all of your data. Where as with PHP you have to put loops and do a lot of extra work. I’m sure many people would argue with me, which is fine, but I honestly am not a big fan of PHP. I don’t mind coding in it, and I love that there is a lot of open source for the language, however, it CAN be very tedious and annoying. On top of that, some of the error messages aren’t descriptive enough and can sometimes be very confusing.

One issue I found extremely frustrating was that I couldn’t use CFdump. For those of you who don’t know Coldfusion CFdump is one of the handiest tools of them all. Basically, it will dump out all of your data from a form or table so you can see all of your data. Displaying the data helps me in a lot of different scenarios. A few time’s my insert statement was throwing errors so I did a CFdump to notice that the variable was undefined because I didn’t put anything into it (this was way in the beginning of my programming days promise!). Sometimes we are so wrapped up in the overall structure of our program that we make little mistakes and functions like CFdump are a huge help.

So to add to the interesting entry… I found a program that allows you to do CFdump in php! I tried it out and it works great! I am so exited! Now in PHP you have the option of doing print_r(), however it is no where as good as cfdump is for debugging.

dBug is a small PHP class that completely duplicates the cftag from coldfusion but in php. It’s very simple and easy to use also!

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

Go take a look and let me know what you think!!! http://dbug.ospinto.com

Tags: cfdump, cfdump in php, cfdump php, coldusion

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 10:08 am and is filed under Coldfusion, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.