One may debug his application with print(”) statements all other the place or alert(”) for JavaScript. Luckily some years ago Firebug extension for Firefox was introduced, which introduced (?) console. Console works absolutely the same as in Linux and can be used not only to execute commands, but receive information from various sources.
To start with, I just love FirePHP. This extension extends Firebug itself and allows PHP to show messages in the console.
FirePHP use special headers to send required information, so browses without FirePHP doesn’t feel any difference, but others can easily extract information. It doesn’t mean that DB profiling information should be visible in production server, but it definitely helps in development stages. If you look at normal website’s headers you would see something like this:
HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:29:29 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1 ... X-powered-by: PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1 Content-Length: 0 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html
where FirePHP modifies it to:
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:28:39 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1 ...
X-powered-by: PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1
X-Wf-Protocol-1: http://meta.wildfirehq.org/Protocol/JsonStream/0.2
X-Wf-1-Structure-1: http://meta.firephp.org/Wildfire/Structure/FirePHP/FirebugConsole/0.1
X-Wf-1-Plugin-1: http://meta.firephp.org/Wildfire/Plugin/ZendFramework/FirePHP/1.6.2
X-Wf-1-1-1-1: 56|[{"Type":"INFO","File":"","Line":""},"This is a debug!"]|
X-Wf-1-1-1-2: 58|[{"Type":"ERROR","File":"","Line":""},"This is an error!"]|
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html
FirePHP website has libraries for sending these headers, but since I was trying it when using Zend Framework, I chose Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug module. It works as writer interface for Zend_Log and since Zend_Log is (or should be) used for all logging in ZF, you can get very nice access to all information (execution time, queries, warnings, etc.) from browser. For example, to send something with Zend Framework, code would look like this:
// Place this in your bootstrap $writer = new Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug(); $logger = new Zend_Log($writer); // Use this in your model, view and controller files $logger->log('This is a log message!', Zend_Log::INFO);
Simple and clean (it won’t work if Zend_Controller_Front is not used, look at manual).
Logging to files still should be used for information which will be required for further analysis, eg. payment gateway errors, but such information as execution time works perfectly in FirePHP. Users doesn’t care how fast page was rendered, but developers sometimes needs this information and in my opinion, using FirePHP sounds most reasonable. Have you tried it?
