Debugging Your Application
It's difficult to debug PHP applications; while there are excellent
PHP-level debugging mechanisms such as XDebug,
it is often hard to integrate these into your environment - perhaps,
you are working on a shared host? Maybe you don't have root access to your
server? In that case, many PHP developers resort to using methods such as
exit ("Processed fine up to here; variable value = " . $myVar);
We all know that these methods are rather limiting - in particular, when you
are trying to debug advanced AJAX applications, such as QCubed apps. That's why
we've included a better mechanism for debugging through Firebug:
Here's how to make it work:
Install the following prerequisites in the order specified below:
Then, come back to this page and open and enable the Firebug console by going
to Tools | Firebug | Enable Firebug in the Firefox menu. Make sure that the
Console, Script, and Net panels are enabled in Firebug.
You can then use the QFirebug static class to output your debugging
messages to the Firebug console. You can expect the standard log()
methods - review the effects by clicking Button A below. It's also really
easy to output the queries (database profile) into the console by using
QFirebug::OutputDatabaseProfile(). Remember that you need to first
enable the profiling for your database for it to work - see this in
action by clicking Button B below.
