The error log is a standard development support tool. It will help you find problems with your application. When developing, I take extra care to make sure that the error log is clean - this includes warnings and notices as well. When your application gets deployed, you can then depend on the error logs to accurately report any issues. [...] On a recent project, my coworker Matt Purdon wrote a pretty awesome debug console that leverages FirePHP support in Zend Framework to log a lot of information about what the application is doing directly to the Firebug console.

The end result is a console that lets you track things like session variables, memcached information and queries executed in the request (with explain plans). You can see a screenshot here.

He explains how to use Zend_Db_Profiler to analyze all SQL queries on a page and how to improve the performance of the queries by adding indexes. Here is a quick modification to his example that will send the profiling information to firebug instead of printing it to the page.

He points out the package you'll need to grab from the Zend Framework to make it happen as well as a bit of code you can use as a starting place to get things up and running.

Nowadays, the code debugger is a tool that has almost all programing environments which allows you to watch the internal work of your applications and finding errors at run time for a easy way. The trouble is when you are working in a client-server architecture model, because from where you send the request (client) can not access the code hosted on the server.

He points out FirePHP as one that doesn't require this sort of installation. Included is a quick tutorial on getting it up and running for your development environment as well as the output formats and how to handle the output you want for debugging only.

The long awaited day has arrived. Zend Framework 1.6 just shipped and with it native support for FirePHP! This means that if you use Zend Framework (ZF) you can now log to your Firebug Console via FirePHP without needing to download any other PHP files such as the FirePHPCore library.

The two new components - Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug and Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug - are used in the debugging and his tutorial shows you how to get started.

I'm celebrating [the death of PHP4] with the second release candidate of Zend Framework 1.6.0, which should drop today. There are a ton of new features available that I'm really excited about. I'm not going to go into implementation details here, but instead catalogue some of the larger and more interesting changes that are part of the release.

He mentions the Dojo integration, updates to the unit testing infrastructure, captcha support in the Zend_Form component, Firebug support and included pagination functionality. You can grab this preview release from the downloads page on the Zend Framework website.

FirePHP is a plugin for Firebug, the web development plugin for Firefox, that allows PHP scripts to talk to a Firebug panel. FirePHP installs alongside Firebug, and provides a simple PHP library to bridge the two. FirePHP provides a window of insight into your PHP applications, with a simple debugging interface that won't interfere with your page content. If you already use Firebug on PHP-powered applications, FirePHP is definitely worth a look.

The FirePHP library installs onto your server and is included, via PHP, into your application. Passing errors back is as simple as using the fb() method to send information out to the Firebug instance waiting on your browser.

Cal Evans at the Zend DevZone just posted my screencast on AJAX and PHP End-to-End Debugging. I mentioned in the screencast that I you could find some information on my blog that is used in the video, so this is that post.

He points out another quick method for debugging an ajax application (as mentioned by Greg Beaver) - adding the GET request values directly to the query string inside the Javascript of your application.

Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. An avid author for both magazines and books author, Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from a unique perspective. Today Davey is going to show us how to debug Ajax applications using Firebug and the Zend Developer toolbar.

You can grab the video [mov] directly from the ZDZ site or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great podcasts.

I did a quick little screencast on how to get rolling with the MyBic 2 Firebug PHP Debugger.

The screencast (mov) steps through the setup of the debugger support for the framework via the Firefox extension all set up custom to work magically with the MyBic framework.

I'm proud to announce to official 1.0.0 release of the MyBic AJAX framework. MyBic has been stable in production for months now with 0 memory leaks and 0 outstanding bugs known to date. MyBic has been successfully flying in some of the worlds top aircraft with 0 supervision in kiosk based devices.

Major advancements for this release include the addition of support for the Firebug debugger with a Firefox extension bundled in. You can grab this latest update from the project's website.