On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you a different method for debugging your code than the usual print_r or var_dump - using FirePHP, a tool that uses messaging to relay information back to your browser.

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.