Debugging Protocol Shoot-out

(Note: I might be biased as I'm one of the authors of the DBGp protocol.)

(Note: As the PHP IDE project seem to have swapped the meanings of client and server in their specification I will use the terms "debugging engine" and "IDE" in this overview)

Since a few days Zend has published their debugging protocol that they're going to implement for their Eclipse PHP IDE. This protocol is apparently a derivate of the protocol that they now use for their Zend Studio. Lukas already pointed out in his opinion open source should work in such a way that the best technical solution should be used, but the Eclipse project seems to work a bit different. In order to have a small view on what the "better" debugging protocol is I made a small comparison between the protocol that Zend published and DBGp that is used in Komodo and a number of other commercial, free and open source IDEs.

Protocol Communication

The PHP IDE protocol is binary while DBGp is an ASCII/XML based format.

A binary protocol uses less data over the wire and will therefore be faster to transport data with. However a binary protocol is also less flexible as all data types need to be defined exactly and the protocol specifications are required to be very rigid. An ASCII/XML based protocol uses more bandwidth, but it is more flexible as the format doesn't have to be so rigid. It is also much easier to debug by just looking at what goes over the wire.

Session Initialization

The PHP IDE protocol allows you select a host and port to which the debug engine should connect to the IDE through an HTTP parameter in the request to the webserver. DBGp does not have such mechanism.

On first sight it seems like a good idea to have the visitor of the web site to select which host and port to connect to as this makes things more flexible. However you should realize that not only the person who is debugging the application and set the host and port, but also everybody else who is visiting the site. Unless the debugging engine has configuration options to only allow a certain set of hosts this makes it easy for an attacker to manipulate an application. DBGp instead has the facility for Proxy Servers that allow you to have multiple people debugging applications on the same development server.

Transporting Variables

The PHP IDE protocol uses serialized data to transfer variables from the debugging engine to the IDE. (It does not define what kind of serialization is used, so I have to assume it's the same as the output of PHP's serialize() call). DBGp uses an XML format.

Of course serialized PHP data uses less data and an XML format to describe a variable takes more space. But PHP's serialized data is a format that is only specific for PHP and will not match correctly to other languages. DBGp's XML format is language agnostic and allows the definition of a typemap to see which language's native type maps to a DBGp data type.

The PHP IDE protocol allows you to select the maximum depth of variable contents to return when you request a variable, DBGp has something similar by means of setting options for a debugging connection. Besides a maximum depth DBGp also provides functionality for limiting the amount of elements that is returned in one array, and how much of the content of a variable is returned. This was added so that one array with 10.000 elements containing a 500 byte string can not clog down the connection between debugging engine and IDE.

Breakpoint Support

The PHP IDE protocol only supports either conditional breakpoints with a condition, or static breakpoints on a file/line number combination. The DBGp protocol supports breakpoints on exceptions, function entry, function return and watches as well. The DBGp protocol also facilitates that certain breakpoints should only be used when they're reached after or before a certain hit-count.

Output Capturing

The PHP IDE debugger protocol only supports "PHP Script Output", DBGp supports both stdout and stderr capturing in two types of streams.

Conclusion

The proposed protocol for the PHP IDE seems to be less powerful than the DBGp protocol. I wonder then also whether people on the Zend team actually had a look at the DBGp protocol. There were plenty of opportunies where we suggest that there is some discussion about the protocol but there was never any answer to this. In case you're interested in the DBGp protocol and want to discuss things with it, or if you want some help by adapting DBGp to use in an IDE that you are developing feel free to contact us at the Xdebug general mailinglist .