A Solution for "debug source display has encountered a problem..."

It is one thing to follow SEO experts and Google suggestions for creating great content to bring traffic—customers to your estore. That's the first part of the equation. When she/he arrives we have to work hard to make the shopping easy to do and fast responding so that the customer will have a pleasant experience getting the Good Deal and Great $Price on the Supplies they came for.

To optimize a set of managed supplies shops for improved user-experience, I have downloaded, installed & configured eclipse PDT for Windows 2003 Server and xdebug for RedHat Linux El 5 64bit. Both are test servers.

The purpose of this quick log, and perhaps a reason why you have landed here, is to share my observation and a possible diagnosis/solution when you get a message like "debug source display has encountered a problem..." when using eclipse PDT and xdebug to debug your php web applications.

First here are the relevant specs for our environment in case they match or don't match your environment. In order words our solution may or may not help you. We hope it will.

Eclipse PDT Platform

Windows Server 2003 for Small Business Server SP2
Eclipse PDT Build 20090920-1017

Xdebug Platform

Linux 2.6.18-128.1.1.el5 SMP x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Xdebug v2.0.5

A Solution for You?
After double-checking that xdebug has been installed and configured properly, it was discovered that the eclipse pdt platform was using IBM version of the Java system. It turns out that the Windows 2003 server is also hosting IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI V6.1.1) and IBM Websphere Application Server (WAS V6.1) which rely on IBM Java 1.5.

A fresh Java system was downloaded. The version downloaded was Version 6 Update 16. The installation was a breeze. After the installation, it was ensured that the new Java will be used for eclipse pdt operations by doing the following:

1. Set JAVA_HOME as a System Variable (see picture below)












2. Reinstall the Eclipse PDT

3. Restart Eclipse and configure your workspace accordingly with the newly installed Java

We are now able to debug and the steps seem to have resolved the problem: "debug source display has encountered a problem..."