By itself, Firebug is a Firefox add on which helps designers and developers to perform the live management, directly in the web browser of the HTML, CSS or JavaScript code through various editing debugging and monitoring tools. If you are developing Web 2.0 AJAX applications based on PHP, the FirePHP Firebug’s extension will provide a simple alternative to an IDE having an integrated debugger in order to debug various AJAX requests.

While an IDE debugger could represent a convenient solution for AJAX request debugging, it also generates a complex approach in case of specific requests. On the other hand, the FirePHP extension is simpler to use and implement, because it allows the viewing of any PHP variable durring the execution of the JavaScript AJAX code, therefore the response content is not broken.

According to the FirePHP publisher website, this Firebug extension sends the debug information alongside the response and works even in the case of dynamically generated images with PHP scripts:”FirePHP solves the problem of AJAX debugging by sending debug information along with the response. To avoid breaking the response content, the debug information is placed into special HTTP response headers. This works for all types of requests, not just AJAX requests, which means you can even debug requests for images that are dynamically generated by a PHP script. You can use FirePHP in your development environment, or use it to track down bugs that only appear on your production site.”

FirePHP works with the help of two components: FirePHP Firefox add-on and a PHP server library, which encodes the PHP variables and includes them in the response headers.

If you are using a widescreen monitor, the Widerbug Firefox plugin (a modified version of Firebug) will improve the development workflow by displaying the Firebug related information in a sidebar located in the right side of the browser window. In this way, you gain more vertical space during the web development related tasks.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 4:03 am and is filed under AJAX, Freeware that rocks, Web Developer Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.