Raphael Stolt published a method to get a visualization of a Phing buildfile a few days ago:

Out of the box the Phing -l option can be used to get a first overview of all available targets in a given buildfile but it doesn’t untangle the target dependencies and sometimes a picture is still worth a thousand words. Luckily the Ant community already provides several tools to accomplish the visualization of Ant buildfiles, reaching from solutions that apply a Xslt stylesheet upon a given buildfile.

He uses the ant2dot tool and the Graphiz library to show the XML from a buildfile into a graphic. The image represents the flow of the build.

Via | Raphael Stolt

Webgrind is a web frontend for the popular Xdebug. Written by Joakim Nygård and Jacob Oettinger, Webgrind parses the Xdebug output and shows it on a dropdown table.

It doesn’t make such a big job, but it’s nice to see the result on a clean interface. The last release is 0.81, and you can get it from Google Code.

I would like to share with you my friend Arno’s slides. He expounded this presentation during the last PHP Conference in Barcelona. He gave a speech on the usage of frameworks and software components in order to build PHP applications.

The famous Rasmus Lerdorf’s dixit is shown up in these slides, via some amusing examples: Frameworks are performing poorly. Arno prooves this statement using a Hello World application, and yes, Rasmus is right and framework performances suck for Hello Word applications.