Zend recently released one of their latest offerings to the PHP development community - Zend Server. Using the Community Edition of the platform, Christoph Dorn has integrated a popular debugging tool - FirePHP - into his local installation.

This PHP environment bundle is backed by Zend which means it will stay maintained and likely make it into many corporate environments. It also ships with Zend Framework and PEAR which means it has full native FirePHP support right from the start! [...] I am going to walk you through how you can get FirePHP setup for ZendServer with the help of some glue code. The glue is available from the FirePHP PEAR channel and will be maintained along with FirePHP going forward.

Before getting into the installation/configuration of FirePHP, he stops to talk a bit about PEAR and what it can do for you and your applications (and a few places it could improve). Following that, he gets to the good stuff and walks through the install of Zend Server, including the FirePHP PEAR package and doing a little debugging to ensure you're set up correctly.