It's been a while since I've worked on a project which is providing as well as consuming web services.

In this case I need to debug incoming requests that are not initiated from with the browser (I'm using soapui as a test tool).

In order to allow Eclipse to pick up xdebug responses triggered by requests from soapui I just needed to

• start a debuging session within eclipse as normal
• ensure that the query string ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=ECLIPSE_DBGP is appended to all requests by editing the WSDL file so that the address looks like
  

xdebug is an immensely powerful tool for exploring what your code really does.

You can get a long way using print_r  but ultimately this always requires that you predict the path your code will take - and the tricky bit about debugging is you need it when your predications have gone wrong.

It's generally pretty easy to set up

Version conflicts to be aware of

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) now ships with Subversion 1.5 

You can't use a svn 1.4 client and a svn 1.5 client on the same working copy.

While the subversion integration in Eclipse is great I still prefer to do some things on the command line and some with kdesvn.

Then you need to upgrade your subclipse plugin to subclipse 1.4

If you can - then upgrade to Eclipse 3.4 

Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 my key observation is that it's important to read the release notes first.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

There are a few bugs which have affected me

One of the surprising things about Drupal is that it doesn't use object oriented coding.

There's a good page in the Drupal documentation about this

http://api.drupal.org/api/file/developer/topics/oop.html

It makes a good case for the design of Drupal, and goes a long way to explain why Drupal feels more OO than the code looks at first glance.

There has been discussion on the mailing list

Well the new version of Eclipse (3.4 or Ganymede) is out and I've been trying it out. So far I've just installed it, adding in the components I want; and generally trying to see what's new.

Installation

I'm running Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) 

If you try to access a subversion repository over http while using a 3G connection from three.co.uk you may receive an error message like.

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/repos'
svn: Processing PROPFIND request response failed: Premature end of file. (/repos)

This is because three.co.uk uses a proxy to interecept web traffic on their network.

Using doc-comments in Eclipse really helps productivity by providing lots of tool-tip help and auto completion.

A colleague recently pointed out that Eclipse can auto-complete object properties (as long as you use the @property tag). I've found this really helpful and have been creating objects to return pass around - and found it a vwery neat way of working.

I've recently been working with AJAX and SOAP which both result in multiple sessions running concurrently.

For example if you have an AJAX progress bar for a large file upload one session is uploading the file while a series of shorter sessions check on progress and update the bar.

How to track both parts of this cleanly has had me scratching my head a bit - but the solution is fiendishly simple.

It turns out that there is a buried configuration setting in Eclipse (my IDE of choice) which allows you to debug multiple sessions.