This one I've run into a few times over the past few weeks and it has caused me a little bit of an annoyance because it is difficult to debug a variable when you cannot see what is inside of it (which is the whole point of having the debugger)!

This I think is becoming more of a problem as more code switches to using PHP5 only features as Joomla 1.6 is doing.

So for example, take a look at the following snippet from the JAccess class definition below, which contains two static class variables:

class JAccess
{
/**
* @since 1.6
*/
protected static $viewLevels = array();

/**
* @since 1.6
*/
protected static $assetRules = array();

// Other code follows...
}

When I'm debugging the methods within this class that use the above static class variables, the debugger provides me with NO INFORMATION about them, so I have no idea what they contain unless I assign them to some other variable or something silly like that (when I should be able to just view them like I can for any other sort of variable).

I think this is more of a bug than anything else, but it would be a great thing to have this working properly.

Aside from the static class variables, Joomla also creates quite a few DEFINES() as part of the application. While PHP has a lot of predefined constants already (and we wouldn't really need nor want all of those displayed in the debugger) I think it could be really useful if the DEFINES() that have been made as part of the project's execution could be added in a separate tab (so in addition to the "Local", "Globals", "Watch", "Immediate", "Call Stack", and "Breakpoints" tabs there would be an additional tab named something like "Defines" or "Project Constants").

Thank you for the consideration!