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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You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.

What if you could just think “I wonder what my stats are today?” and your Mac would tap into your mind and give you the answer. It’s probably a good thing it has not advanced that far yet.

But what if you could ask your Mac and it would answer?

Well … It can! The needed speech tools are built right into Mac OS X.

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Just ran across this post where Felix shares some wisdom he gained while re-writing CakePHP’s Set::extract() (code) method to make it faster and add some XPath 2.0 support.

If you need a function to have the highest performance, try to express it non-recursively. It can make a 500% difference.

Now I thought the 500% speed gain (and associated fewer CPU cycles) was a number he grabbed out of the air or it was based on comparisons with the previous Set::extract() method and very specific to that case. It surely would not apply to any algorithm in general as some are much more complex than others.

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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.