Wkhtmltopdf is extremely cool. I've used qtwebkit for generating server-side page images before using python-webkit2png, and that's fine (unlike using Firefox running in xvfb!), but I need to produce PDFs. So, I looked around and found several neat, simple PHP wrappers for calling wkhtmltopdf, and even a PHP extension. "Great", I thought, "I'll just install that and spend time working on the layouts since the code looks really simple". I spoke too soon.

He goes through each step of the process - installing the needed wkhtmltox and libwkhtmltox support, having to manually compile wkhtmltopdf and some of the small changes you'll need to make to the Makefile to get things to cooperate. He shows where to put the resulting application files and the name of the extension to enable in your php.ini.

With the recently released PHP 5.4, the Suhosin patch and extension were removed from many Linux distribution packages (i.e., Debian et al.) and until three weeks ago, there was no possibility to compile and run the Suhosin extension under PHP 5.4. This little howto shall serve as installation instruction for Debian Wheezy users - your mileage may vary. I blogged about this here.

They start with the apt-get commands to install the latest PHP5 for your distribution (yum commands are similar, of course) and includes the location to download the latest Suhosin version from Stefan Esser's github account. Unpack it, compile and "phpize" it and if all goes well, you should have a shared module built and ready for use.

Here is a quick step by step guide on how to get mongodb and PHP5.2 mongo pecl extension going on your MacOSX in 32bit mode! NOTE: 32 bit mongodb binaries have 2GB address space limit so you wont be able to process too much on your laptop. You will still be able to code and connect to remote instances just fine.

His process includes five steps - well, eight if you count the optional "install MongoDB" ones too - complete with the commands you'll need to get things compiled, ready for copy and paste. You can find the MongoDB PECL package here.

Today I needed to get a client application up and running on my local system. This application uses the Geoip PECL package, so I needed to get this up and running. This turned out to be slightly more difficult than just a PECL install, as you're missing some libraries by default, so here is my log of things to do to get it up and running.

He gives the complete list of steps his followed including downloading the source and his way around this "System could not load this extension" issue. The trick was to recompile the source with the correct architecture. By default his extension was built with i386 instead of 64-bit but updating some of the CFLAGS settings (and a few other environment variables) got things compiling correctly.

Last month, MS announced the preview release of SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, a 64-bit binary driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This is good news for companies using heterogenous platforms e.g. LAMP stack running a PHP application that connects to both MySQL and MSSQL Server. Meaning, these companies no longer have to use third-party drivers such as FreeTDS that MS doesn't support. Then a few days ago, MS released version 1 of the driver. I immediately downloaded the driver and recompiled PHP with it as a PDO (PHP Data Object) ODBC driver.

His process has five steps to it, including one for making a test script (code included) and another with a few gotchas/performance considerations to keep an eye out for when using the driver.

Zend Server CE for Mac (as of this writing), comes compiled as an i386 executable only. This includes the PHP binary, php library, and apache binaries that come shipped with ZSCE. While ZSCE works great out the box with all the provided extensions, you might find that you want some additional 3rd party PHP extensions compiled/linked into this stack. That's where things get a little confusing, and in this post, we'll look at how to install the gearman extension.

He give two methods - the easy way where you can export a CFLAGS setting to compile with multiple architectures or the harder way (that works for Gearman), building static libraries. The full list of commands (and some example output) is included in the post. In the comments there's also an example of the install if you're using Macports.

JIT compilation is the main topic of the episode 19 of the Lately in PHP podcast presented by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert who received as guests Miloslav Beno of the Phalanger team and Nuno Lopes of the PECL LLVM project to discuss this and other interesting topics of the PHP scene.

The hosts and their guests talk about compiling PHP, things that happened in 2011 and look forward to what's to come in the world of PHP in 2012. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to the podcast feed.

While it's sufficient for many users, as PHP sees increased use by large sites like Wikipedia and Facebook, the ability to serve more requests on fewer servers becomes increasingly important. Some efforts have been made in this area in the last few years, both within and outside the PHP internals team. However, understanding exactly what's going on requires a bit of background both in history and concepts.

He goes through some of the origins of the PHP language (from the early days with Rasmus Lerdorf) to the fact that the PHP language itself is interpreted - complete with some of the overhead that comes with that. He also mentions various projects that have tried to compile PHP back down to C to increase performance like Roadsend, HipHop and, most recently, the HipHop virtual machine from Facebook.

I have been tinkering with CLANG's static analyzer lately. This post summarizes how I installed LLVM and CLANG and performed the analysis of a build of the PHP interpreter.

He includes all the commands (unix-based) to get the clang tools/libraries installed in the correct places as well as what to add to your $PATH to get the "scan-build" command to work with the make and make install parts of the PHP compile process.

One thing I can say is that, even though I use a convenient app like MAMP PRO to set up my local development environment, I'm glad my sysadmin-fu is up to snuff enough to fly without the conveniences because after this ordeal, I feel like I might as well have made my MAMP stack from scratch with all the hoops I jumped tonight.

He shares a few of the things he discovered along the way like: the location of MAMP's "pecl" command, an error caused by a bad pear.conf file, doing custom compiles of PHP and libssh as a fallback and getting the extension to work in the CLI PHP version too.