The November issue of php|architect is finally out. Why is this exiting for me? Because I had something to do with it:

/etc: FirePHP for Ajax Development

Firebug is without doubt the most popular development tool among Firefox plugins. Christoph Dorn thought it would be nice to have PHP integration for it.

by Christoph Dorn

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I have released a new version of FirePHP. You can download it here. It will also be available on the Mozilla Add-ons site in a few days.

The release includes 27 bug fixes and feature enhancements. The scope of this release was primarily focused on improving the current feature set in terms of usability, reliability and support for logging complex objects. You can find the changelog here.

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Eran Galperin has written a great post on profiling MySQL queries with Zend_Db and optimizing them by hand.

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.

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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.

There are two primary components available at this time. One is the Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug and the other the Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug.
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I stumbled across this post during one of my “firephp” google searches.

I find it great for inherited websites where I need to troubleshoot problems on live servers, as I can have all the debug/variable dump/etc crap dump to the FirePHP console so it doesn’t show up on the website while I’m trying to track down a problem and the budget is not there to make a dev copy of the system[they need an in and out fix, 4 hours tops]

It illustrates a great use case. Many times you need to maintain legacy code that you don’t have a development environment for. FirePHP enables you to do ad-hock debugging on a live site without affecting site visitors as long as you are careful not to cause any parser errors. Maybe not a great idea on a high-traffic site, but chances are if the site runs on more than one server or has a lot of traffic the owners will be able to afford a development environment for you.

It may also be a great tool for helping you convert PHP4 applications to PHP5.