Thankfully, PHP provides the interactive shell, allowing you to test out PHP interactively with immediate feedback. Here's how to take advantage of this mature feature of PHP.

With the help of the "-a" flag on the command line, the PHP binary will hand you an environment where you can code PHP and instantly see the results. He does mention a few quirks that make it different than working with PHP through a web server, namely moving in and out of code blocks and remembering to finish out with a semi-colon when the line is done.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

PHP SOAP extension is good to get started, to play around with. However, it falls much short in meeting the enterprise demands in the SOA era.

He talks about things missing (like binary file features and lots of security features). He also notes something that most PHP developers love about the extension - the WSDL parsing that makes it so easy to simply call a remote service without having to go through the pain of hacking through it yourself.

The first two concern the htscanner package - first, the initial release of the extension that works to emulate htaccess support for non-Apache web servers (like FastCGI or lighttpd). The second related post notes that that Windows binaries for the functionality are also posted on the pecl4win website.

Next on his list were some update to the Zip PECL package, a fix to correct issues found when using PHP versions 5.1.0, 5.1.1, and 5.1.2 (due to an internal function name issue).