NYCPHP Meetup

[Marc Antony Vose]

Just reading email now, five days later, and it kind of raises an  
interesting point for me.

I don't really have much substantive to to address your questions; I  
had never heard of FirePHP until I saw it just now.  However, it could  
be really beneficial for debugging situations like on a ridiculous  
thing I concocted to solve a particular problem, so I thank you for  
bringing it up.

Basically, I had abstract PHP templates writing out JavaScript  
depending on database lookups, which JavaScript then created all the  
XHTML and then makes an Ajax call, connecting to a PHP proxy script on  
the local server that passes calls through cURL to a remote server  
that is running a separate PHP script.  Once I got into this,  
basically I found out that it was completely impossible to debug as a  
singular whole, and the only real solution was to be incredibly  
disciplined in my coding, and run unit tests as much as I could on  
individual modules before assembling the pieces.

Nevertheless, sometimes there would be unexpected input coming from  
the top that would cause a failure at some point down the five  
levels.  It sounds ridiculous saying this out loud, but I literally  
had the scripts sending me emails with debug data in them, just to  
root out SQL issues, or whatnot.  (Log files would work, too, but I  
found email to be a more convenient solution somehow, and the  
information wasn't terribly important from a security sense anyway.)

Anyway, I am interested in people's debugging techniques when they  
have multilayered projects like this, FirePHP or otherwise.

Cheers,

Marc



Le 14 août 08 à 22:40, bzcoder a écrit :

> I was wondering if anyone else has been using FirePHP?  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]
>
> Originally I felt it was somewhat of a waste, since you can use  
> debugging tools much more easily, but when I don't always have the  
> luxury of working with a server that gives me debug capabilities, it  
> seems a great solution for low end work.
>
> http://www.firephp.org/
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has any other thoughts on low end debugging  
> tricks that might be easier/better or such - or any thoughts on  
> tricks to using firephp more robustly.