Debug with FirePHP

I am using FirePHP to write debug messages. It works with CodeIgniter quite well. There's a simple flag (TRUE / FALSE) in a config file to enable it.

When enabled, every SQL statement along with a returned record count (in the case of a SELECT) is dumped to the console. Nice. Easy to see where you go wrong in your SQL statements. IE - "well, that query should have returned 100 rows - why is it returning 10?". It also has the nice side effect of displaying when a given query runs more than once. I had some logic in code that was causeing one SQL statement to be run 4 or 5 times. Output to the web page was fine, though. Using the FirePHP debugger, I soon realised that "Hey, how come that statement appears several times ?".

One other gotcha is that if you don't have FirePHP installed, but run with debugging on - it borks badly. I have to confirm this, but worse case... It should be off in production, anyway.

EDIT - no, it doesn't bork. It's fine to run with debug = on and not have FirePHP installed. I must have been having a bad hair day !!!

EDIT #2 - In Xampp (Windows) you need to alter the php.ini. In an Ubuntu LAMP install, you don't.

Stay tuned.