Ask YC: IDE debugging for web programming - a dream or a reality?

So I've done a lot of java + eclipse and C++ + Visual Studio (that + looks awkward..) development in my life and find that the debugging IDE tools in eclipse/VS were absolutely key to my adoption and performance in using those languages. Most importantly, I like that they allow you to step into and out of function calls, view the call stack and variable values real-time at any line of code as the code progresses. This was a key learning tool for me.

Has anybody successfully done this in with any web programming languages + frameworks? I'm a cakePHP developer, for example, and I'd like to see the sequence of calls from the time the dispatcher is instantiated to the time that the views are echo'd and sent to the browser.

Just curious if anybody has done this successfully in PHP, Symfony, CakePHP, Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, whatever it may be... I've been doing web development for a few years now and have resorted to elaborate print statements and variable dumps for my debugging needs, I need more!

If you've lived the debugging dream, or have any debugging tips to offer, please post the tools you've used and any resources you may know of to help me (and our readers) set it up.

I've recently installed Eclipse PDT with Zend Debugger in an attempt to do this and had luck in simple scripts with include statements, but once mod_rewrite gets involved, everything goes straight to hell.

I'm curious if I should keep trying or if it's nothing but a dream...