Christoph Dorn has a new post about using his recently released FirePHP Companion to get a better perspective on how your application works with its cache (information like the location of the cache file).

I thought I would rework the example I included in my php|architect article. You will see how much easier it now is to accomplish the same, and with much less code, using FirePHP Companion instead of the existing FirePHP extension.

In his example he has a site with an RSS feed that's cached and compares the old way of doing things to the simpler, easier way to use the features the Companion offers to record the process the script takes to build the feed and pushes the results back out at the end of the script.

A screencast is included in the post to show you how his example PHP code and the plugin all fit together.

Christoph Dorn has a new post to his blog about a tool he's released to compliment his FirePHP - the FirePHP Companion.

When I originally wrote FirePHP in 2007 I had big ambitions as to the features I was going to incorporate. [...] What I needed was a wholistic approach to the problem area of server-side application intelligence and a set of libraries based on standards that could be applied cross language. After countless hours of research and development I am pleased to announce the first fruit of my labor.

The the post includes all of the instructions you'll need to get this new tool up and working with your site. There's also a screencast on the documentation that walks you through everything too.