One of the big features arriving with PHP 5.4 is the addition of a built-in basic webserver for use in development environments. Quite a few of the other scripting languages have something like this so I'm very pleased to see it in PHP. Using a server like this makes it easy to quickly try out some scripts without needing to configure apache or really do anything much! I had to look up a few things to get started, so I thought I'd write them down for posterity.

She includes instructions on how to get the server up and running from the command line, updating the location of the document root with a command line option and using a simple "routing.php" script to act as a front controller. Changing the hostname is as simple as changing "localhost" to something else when starting the server.

Building web applications is nothing new anymore, as we've been doing it since the early days of the internet, but we've always done this on a single system. Even when Zend Framework came round, we kept doing the same thing and build apps for a single environment. But as I've discussed already in my previous article, developing for the cloud requires another approach. [...] With Zend Framework developing applications running on these separate compontents becomes really easy. It's like having your cloud toolbox right in your pocket.

He walks you through the settings needed to interact with a MySQL database backend, setting up sessions to write to the database, caching information to a memcache server and storing files on a remote destination (in this case cloud storage).

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.

This is another wonderful setup that I've found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup. [...] Ngnix, unlike Apache, doesn't actually load PHP. Instead, it hands it off as a proxy to a "php handler" which acts like an Application Server. So nginx by itself won't serve PHP files, but just static files.

He briefly introduces Nginx and PHP-FPM for those not familiar and points out that this combination is very fast, even without much configuration. The packages are installed with the aptitude installer and minimal changes are made to the php-fm and nginx configuration files (mostly to set up whatever your domain/virtual host is).

Working on setting up the Rest Plugin for CakePHP helped me realize that i wanted to set up JSON output for some of my actions. This way, if you request for example "www.yourapp.com/app/post/view/1.json" in the url, you will be returned the JSON post data. This excellent tutorial here will help you achieve it.

Changes include updates to configuration for routing, using the RequestHandler component and setting your actions to output the data correctly when the ".json" is detected on the request.

Every time you purchase a new Linux VPS, you need to go ahead and set it up for use. Even though we manage to do one server a month, we always seem to forget one thing or the other. So we decided to write down the things that we do. I thought it would be a good thing to share it with everybody as well, so that we could get a few comments about what we're doing wrong, and people who do it the first time can probably pick up a few things from here.

Steps and software involved in their process include:

• Updating to the latest Ubuntu packages
• Creating other users for the system
• Installing the web environment (including PHP, MySQL, phpmyadmin and Apache2)
• Minin for monitoring
• Configuring IPTables
• Installing Fail2Ban

All of this comes complete with the additions you'll need to make to configuration files and the commands to get everything installed (via aptitude).

In the first two parts of this series we covered setting up the server and an introduction to Phing. This post will cover managing our database code with dbdeploy and Phing.

He points out that there's no "silver bullet" when it comes to automated database management but he's found dbdeploy as a good tool for his needs. He includes the configuration changes to get the database login information into Phing and a few new targets/tasks to add to the Phing configuration for initializing the database and applying patches.

I was writing about PHP.next before, many things improved there meanwhile. Most notably we have a committed version number: The next PHP release will be called PHP 5.4. The topic I want to talk about today is "Improved application portability" which covers multiple small changes which aim at making it simpler for developers to write applications working on any PHP setup.

The first two will be immediately familiar to any PHP developer, but the third might be a little more elusive. This option was used to compile in multi-byte encodings to use for data in an application. Unfortunately a good implementation (that didn't use mbstring) couldn't be found, so they're removing the feature.

When using several PHP installations with phpfarm, installing PHP extensions is not always easy - mostly because Pyrus is very strict about package files - and many of the packages in PECL unfortunately have invalid non-validating package.xmls.

The installation follows most of the normal process with one exception - you use the phpfarm phpize and point the configure to use the phpfarm ini configuration file then enable it as usual.

I dunno about anyone else but my development environment is usually in some form of barely-controlled chaos. It's one command away from collapse with folders full of test software, symlinks that lead to long-forgotten libraries and ancient VCS repos that only a mother could love, all held together with sticky-tape shell scripts. [...] This series of posts will look at the tools available to PHP developers who want to be liberated from the mundane and the frustrating tasks that plague our lives.

He doesn't describe the installation of the basic platform - Apache, PHP and MySQL on Ubuntu - but jumps right into the details of the settings. He shows how to:

• configure the VirtualHosts in Apache,
• installing and updating PEAR,
• Install/configure XDebug,
• Set up PHPUnit,
• and install git for version control

In the next post he'll show how to set up Phing for building/testing out the code.