Lots of exciting releases lately.

• Eclipse PDT 1.0 – the last couple of release candidates have been really solid. I haven’t had a chance to checkout the XDebug integration yet.
• jQuery UI – along with the new jQuery 1.2.1 release, this new UI library has the possibility of revolutionizing Drupal.
• Drupal 6 beta 1 – the face of things to come.

Well, according to my my page tracker, lots of people are interested in using Eclipse PDT and Xdebug, so I thought I would give a quick report on upgrading to PDT RC3. Note: I see the XDebug plug-in v0.2.0 is out. At the moment, I am still using v0.1.3
Update: Looks like I can’t keep using v0.1.3. Upgrading to Java6 has triggered this error when debugging: An internal error occurred during: ‘Computing hasChildren’.
I just downloaded v0.2.1, dropped the two jars into the eclipse plugins director, deleted the old jars, started up PDT again, and so far so good.

Eclipse is a solid tool for creating Drupal modules, but I haven’t figured out anyway to use it to create releases. Eclipse comes with a CVS plug in that allows you to checkout the contributions/modules, add your new module and commit it all, no problem. But when it comes time to branch your release(as described here: http://drupal.org/node/17570), simply trying to do: “cvs tag -b DRUPAL-5 modules/mymodule” seems to be impossible. Eclipse is not willing to branch with out also tagging the version you are branching from, and the Drupal contrib release system rejects these verison tags.

Update (since a lot of people still seem to be coming to this page): The latest version of PDT is 1.0.2, which works with Eclipse 3.3, and it is excellent. The Xdebug plugin is now part of the core package, and the instructions on how to use it are part of the standard help.

I decide to move into the word of real-time debugging today. I have been using the PHPEclipse plug in, but I could not find a 5.1.4 version of the debugger it uses. Fortunately, I was able to get the eclipse PDT (formally PhpIDE) working with XDebug.