cakephp

Recently I've been doing some development of classes that run under the Job Queue CakePHP plugin, a great plug in btw, and I had a need to debug some of the logic.  As a reminder I use NetBeans 6.9.x on XPsp3 to develop code that is housed on a CentOS 5.6 VirtualBox instance that I access via a Samba share. 

I just don't get it - why is debugging with a real debugger such a black science in PHP?  You'd never see someone dump code to the screen in a C++ dev environment, yet based on what I've just seen while searching Google for some creative CakePHP techniques you'd never know that some PHP "developers" (no html tag that I'm aware of for 'air quotes'...) have an inkling that debuggers exist.