As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new tutorial from Christoph Dorn about combining the Zend Framework with the FirePHP debugging tool that now comes included in the latest release (ZF 1.6).

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.

The two new components - Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug and Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug - are used in the debugging and his tutorial shows you how to get started.

The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post covering a very helpful tool when it comes to debugging your sever-side scripts with something light and client-side (but powerful) - the FirePHP project combined with Firebug.

FirePHP is a plugin for Firebug, the web development plugin for Firefox, that allows PHP scripts to talk to a Firebug panel. FirePHP installs alongside Firebug, and provides a simple PHP library to bridge the two. FirePHP provides a window of insight into your PHP applications, with a simple debugging interface that won't interfere with your page content. If you already use Firebug on PHP-powered applications, FirePHP is definitely worth a look.

The FirePHP library installs onto your server and is included, via PHP, into your application. Passing errors back is as simple as using the fb() method to send information out to the Firebug instance waiting on your browser.

Arnold Daniels has a suggestion for developers out there to help improve the performance of their applications - check your loops.

So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.

He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can't install those, however, he has another suggestion - FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.

With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:

• Get the data ready before going into the loop
• Don't do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
• Use create_function to aid you
• Be careful with abstraction in loops
• Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
• Last resort: write an extension

With the recent release of a new Firefox/PHP combination extension, several developers were interested in just how it all worked. One such developer is Terry Chay who has posted about it to his blog today after looking into how it all fits together.

The standard way of debugging in PHP involves just echoing shit to the screen. The fact that PHP is a scripting language makes this an excellent way of debugging on the web. But what happens when doing this breaks your site?

That's where FirePHP comes in - it sends along a special request from your PHP script (as fired off by special code you insert) to include debugging information inside a different part of a "multipart/mixed" message. Terry also includes some of his sample code (including a custom version of the software) that he used to get things working. Check out the screenshot for the results.

As mentioned on dzone.com, there's an extension for Firefox, FirePHP, that allows you to get a bit more info on what your PHP scripts are up to.

FirePHP allows you to take a deeper look at all the work your PHP code does to generate that page you are currently looking at in your Firefox browser.

Just install the FirePHP Firefox extension, PHP PEAR package and add a few lines of code to your PHP application to get started. You will see a "FirePHP" tab in your Firebug extension to bring your PHP backend logic to your fingertips!

You can check out screenshots of it in action, a demo of its use, and of course, download the latest version all from their site. It works either as a separate window or attached in your browser and, based on an XML capabilities file, works with your application to provide details about your scripts.