New Firesymfony Release

I'm pleased to announce the release of version 1.1 of Firesymfony. This time it has a new design that we believe improves the user experience. The design was made by my colleague Jacqueline Wan and the logo by Olaf Horstmann.

Bellow you can see some screenshots and here you have the urls to update the symfony plugins and the Firebug extension:

Symfony Plugin

FB Extension

About Panel:

Configuration and Variables Panel:

Logs Panel:

Cache Panel:

Database Panel:

Timers Panel:

Information Panel:

FireSymfony featured at symfony.es

The guys from symfony.es had published a review of the FiresSymfony plugin/extension. This make us really happy because it shows that the community is showing interest for the project. Just to give some numbers, the Firebug extension has been downloaded more than 400 times already.  So, a big thanks to everyone for the support! :)

New Version of FireSymfony - New Features & Improvements

The last week has been a good one for the project, along with new cool features arrives also the news that the project will be supported by the company I work for -TheNetCircle-. 

This means that they will provide hosting for the soon to be released  official project web site and blog and that I can pick from time to time some hours to write some docs for the project or work on a specific feature. That doesn't means that I won't keep working on the extension on my free time at home... It means that now I have more reasons to go on and keep improving this project.   

About what's new on this release...

Cache Panel

If you access your website on the dev environment with the new version of the extension you will notice that there is no cache information displayed on the page. That's because I removed all the information divs added by symfony and placed them inside a Cache Panel on FireSymfony. What does this means? In that panel you will see a table displaying on each row all the cache information of a given partial: lifetime, last modification time, and cache key. If you roll over a row then the cached partial will be highlighted on the page just the same way FireBug highlights elements when you are inspecting your web page.  For more information about it check this page: CacheTab.

Database Panel

When you access this panel you will see what looks like a normal symfony web debug toolbar database panel -wow that's a mouth full- but if you click on any of the displayed queries, then it will get copied to the clipboard, so you can go and paste it for debugging on your SQL client of choice.  

New Splash Page with Logo

Thanks to the work of Olaf Horstmann the splash page of the extension has a new and fresh look. You can check by yourself.

Small Improvements

I also added some small improvements to the user interface. Now the panels switching buttons show the state, so you wont get lost guessing in which panel are you. I refactored the code and fixed bugs. 

On the symfony plugin side I added a fsNoJsonException that will be thrown in case there is no json_encode support on the server. Also now the json object is called FireSymfonyDebugData to avoid javascript namespace clashing. So in this version you also need to upgrade the plugin.

As you can read here I was also playing on how to port the extension to the cool WebKit Web Inspector, so soon there will be a version for that browser family too -that includes Google Chrome and Safari-.

FireSymfony to support WebKit

Some nights ago I downloaded the last version of WebKit and discovered inside the really cool new WebInspector, which I also saw came bundled with Google Chrome and is supposed to be included in futures releases of Safari.

I read on the WebKit blog that the inspector is written in Javascript, so I decided to dig inside and see what could be done to extend it... 

I discovered a neat code design that is virtually waiting there to be extended. The structure is easy to follow and is almost plug and play. With almost I mean that at this time there is a little hacking to do to plug something in, but anyway it looks promising. 

To state a proof of concept I ported parts of FireSymfony to Web Inspector as you can see in the screenshot below.

My idea is to continue the improvement of FireSymfony for both browser families because besides the neat interface of Web Inspector I think it will became a key tool for web page debugging since it is included on Chrome and probably on a future release of Safari.

Also after I get more experience on extending Web Inspector I plan to post some tutorials on how to do it.

FireSymfony featured at Ajaxian.com

I'm more than glad to announce that the FireSymfony extension has been featured at Ajaxian.

A big thanks to them for supporting the project. 

Also I want to report that there is a new version of the extension for download from the mozilla add-ons web page. The reason of the update was to fix an incompatibility bug with Prototype.

The symfony plugin has been updated as well, fixing bugs as reported on the project web page. Also I started the project wiki adding detailed setup instructions for the plugin.

FireSymfony - First release is out

I'm happy to announce the release of both the FireSymfony extension for Firebug and the firesymfonyPlugin for symfony.

The extension can be downloaded from the mozilla add ons web site. The symfony plugin is available as a pear package from the framework plugins website.

So those that live on the edge can start testing this plugin.

I also created a google group where you can provide feedback and request new features, as well as have some discussions about it.

In a future post I will provide more details about upcoming features and roadmap.

Some screenshots: