On your development environment, you can install a handy module called Devel (http://drupal.org/project/devel), which provides several sophisticated tools designed to help developers create and debug Drupal code.
The following are a few of the features of this module:
- Functions used for dumping objects and arrays into formatted Drupal output
- Tools for analyzing database usage and performance
- A content generator for quickly populating your site with testing content
