Coming from the Microsoft world, where Visual Studio, Windows, and IIS seemingly play nice together, I can attach the Visual Studio debugger to the IIS process and debug code in play. When a web service call is made to the IIS server, I can evaluate the parameters, and watch the code execute.
Can I do the same with PHP scripts running in Apache on Ubuntu? I have PHP5 on Apache2 and have installed xdebug. PHPINFO() seems to think this is all setup and ready, only I have no idea how to attach this debugger to the httpd process and/or which editor/IDE to use to view the debugging.
You can use a browser plugin for Firefox called firePHP to debug php along with editing it "in play". I am not entirely sure if Chrome has a similar plugin, but I'm going to lean towards yes.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firephp/
You could also install Netbeans and use that as your IDE.
https://netbeans.org/kb/docs/php/debugging.html