Its been quite some time since I looked at a PHP script, the first dynamic website I built was PHP and PostgresSQL and for sometime it was PHP all the way. But sometimes project requirements dictate a certain language, so later I worked with Allaire Coldfusion, ASP and ASP.NET. I used two debugging techniques for PHP. The first method is turning on error reporting which is an after the fact method of determining the problem. It can sometimes be difficult to determine the cause of the problem, as error messages often tell you exactly what is wrong not the cause. The second method employed is printing out variables at points in my scripts to narrow down the point at where the error is occurring. I thought it would be a good time to look at some of the developments in debugging PHP. Unless you write your code perfectly first time off debugging is an important part of developing any sort of software.
Implementing keyboard shortcuts can greatly improve the user interface of your web application. Interface navigation is a good place to start, for example if you are viewing a slide show of photos you may expect to be able to navigate through the photos using the left and right arrow keys on you keyboard. For an application that has a popup dialog very common functionality is the ablity to push the escape key to cancel the dialog and close it.
Its been over a month now since Internet Explorer 8 was released on March 19th. I have been busy lately and I finally got round to installing it. I have to say I was impressed, it works well and is quite responsive. I would have to say IE has caught up with FireFox in terms of all the features I like in a browser. Many of the features are already in other browsers. I spent quite a bit of time developing websites so I think best of all is the built in developer tools and JavaScript debugger.