As the technical manager of a suite of software projects, one of my duties is doing code reviews. One of the things I see far more often than I'd like when doing reviews is debugging PHP code committed and pushed up the chain. [...] The safest method of debugging requires configuring your IDE to use a tool like Xdebug or Zend Debugger to trace currently executing code. This isn't always practical. In the absence of using a fully configured debug environment, I turn to FirePHP.

He shows how to set up and configure FirePHP to work with your debugging and some suggestions on browser extensions you can install to view the messages. Sample code is included showing you how to use the tool to send messages back to the browser including grouping messages, building tables and something that shows a conditional caching report message.

PHP is very well used scripting language in now a days. But PHP does not have any inbuilt debugging tools or extension. But we have some extensions and tools available which serves the debugging purpose of the PHP.

The tools on their list involve both the backend and frontend:

• XDebug
• Zend Debugger
• FirePHP
• PHP Console

Due to sloppy programming in the past many PHP error logs can become very clogged up and, unless you use some fancy grep technique, unusable. [...] A project has been around for some time now called FirePHP. This enables us to log messages of various levels of severity to the Firebug console! - Awesome. Just imagine if you are developing an ajax app, you could have all your debug messaging in one place.

He walks you through the steps needed to get the logging up and running - setting up FireBug (if you don't have it already) and FirePHP, editing your Zend Framework bootstrap file to add an _initLogging() method and using it for logging, both in the backend script and on the frontend in the console. He also includes a quick update to the logging method that only logs to the Firebug console if the environment is not production.

If you use Firefox, I bet you already know Firebug extension. This is irreplaceable tool for web development. But there is also FirePHP extension, which provides possibility to log into Firebug console from PHP scripts. This is very convenient way for debugging process, because logs are independent from application output.

He shows the integration you can do with the Zend Framework's Zend_Log component to write basic messages and the Zend_Wildfire component to write tabular data back to your browser's console with two snippets of code.

FirePHP can nicely complement the built-in tools available when using Zend Server and can be easily made available to all provisioned sites. This tutorial illustrates how to setup FirePHP 1.0 for all virtual hosts on a Zend Server AMI on Amazon EC2.

He steps you through the process of getting FirePHP installed and working in your browser as well as pulling the "firephp.phar" file in on the Zend Server side. Configuration is pretty simple - the lines for the Apache config are included and the JSON needed to make the credentials for FirePHP are too. A simple test script is created and an auth key is set and you should be up and running.

FirePHP can be useful when debugging remote PHP applications on shared or dedicated servers. This tutorial illustrates how to setup FirePHP 1.0 on Magenting which is a managed Magento hosting service. Go to http://magenting.com/ and create an account. This tutorial was prepared by using a Spark account, but it should work just the same with all plans.

He walks you through all the steps you'll need - getting the FirePHP extension installed, getting the PHP libraries set up on the remote server and configuring it to work with your application. A snippet of code is included that can be used to test the connection.

Get started with FirePHP 1.0 in 5 steps. Why upgrade? Check out the new features.

The steps are simple (it's a pretty easy tool to use):

• Install the FirePHP Companion
• Install FirePHP
• Use the sample code to include in an application
• Authorize the client
• Log a test message (code snippet included)

You can find out more about the FirePHP project on the project's site.

Few tasks are more tedious and frustrating than debugging a Web application. [...] Fortunately, PHP developers have a number of powerful debugging solutions at their disposal. Whether you're merely inspecting array contents or attempting to determine the status of an Ajax-driven POST response, these four solutions are guaranteed to have an immediate impact on your productivity.

His four solutions involve changing the error reporting level on your development environment higher than production to catch issues that might slip through unnoticed, using XDebug, integrating FirePHP and using test-driven development to be sure things work from the outset.

Array and object values may contain a lot more data as FirePHP traverses them (all array elements and object members) until the complete or maximum depth is reached. This is also true when logging exceptions and traces where all function and method arguments are also traversed. The data volume can quickly grow to megabytes which has fatal consequences for transmission of the debug data to the client and the client being able to render it.

The FirePHPPCore API gives you a way to set this maximum depth level bu setting either a "maxArrayDepth" or "maxObjectDepth" on the FirePHP object before sending it out to the logger. There's also a handy feature that, instead of limiting the depth, can filter out just the elements you're interested in. Code snippets for this and a Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug example are all included.

I thought I would rework the example I included in my php|architect article. You will see how much easier it now is to accomplish the same, and with much less code, using FirePHP Companion instead of the existing FirePHP extension.

In his example he has a site with an RSS feed that's cached and compares the old way of doing things to the simpler, easier way to use the features the Companion offers to record the process the script takes to build the feed and pushes the results back out at the end of the script.

A screencast is included in the post to show you how his example PHP code and the plugin all fit together.