Nice bits of symfony: Web Debug Toolbar

Dec 26, 2007 · 2 minute read

I mentioned previously that I’d been playing with the symfony framework on a couple of projects and I have to admit to being more and more impressed as I wade in looking for things. I’ve worked with enough MVC-like frameworks to know they are all quite similar in more ways than they are dramatically different. So it’s the little bits and pieces that win you over.

One of my favourite little bits in symfony has to be the Web Debug Toolbar. When running in development mode you get a little menu floating above your application like so (top right hand corner).

This gives you all sorts of useful information as you’re developing your application - from the number of database queries to the rendering time, with a full logger built in. It’s also been particularly useful in learning symfony - being able to follow the entire request through the stack from the logger is really handy when you don’t know what is going on.

With the increasing use of object relational mapping in web frameworks it’s quite easy to end up with a working application on your development box that turns out to absolutely hammer your database when used in the real world by only a few hundred people (I’m looking at you tagging). The database utilities, showing the number of queries and the SQL for those queries, is particularly handy for finding bottlenecks here.

I’ve not come across something similar in other frameworks, PHP or otherwise. I’d be interested to know if similar things do exist for Rails or Django in particular.