As I foreshadowed in a now distant post, Pierre has installed Oracle 11g Instant Client on the PHP Windows build box and updated the OCI8 build scripts for PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6). PHP 5.3 now has two mutually exclusive versions of the OCI8 extension DLL [...] The two DLLs have the same user script API that do the same thing. You only need to (and only can) enable one at any one time. Choose the one that matches your Oracle client libraries.

The two DLLs - php_oci8.dll and php_oci8_11h.dll - have pretty self-explanitory names, but it could be confusing as to whether you need both or not if you go the 11g route.

When it comes to dealing with different file formats, it's hard to faze PHP. XML documents, PDF files, JPEG images, MP3 media...you name it and, chances are, there's a PHP extension to handle it. And so it is with compression formats like RAR, LZF and Bzip2 - although these archive formats are far less common today than the ubiquitous TAR and ZIP formats, they are still actively used by many applications and projects, and continue to be supported in PHP via PECL extensions.

He pulls in a few PECL extensions to give PHP the power it needs, both for unix-based systems and Windows DLL files. He includes some sample code showing how to open up a rar file and list the contents inside as well as extract the files themselves. And, of course, code examples for compressing files into a new archive is included too.

Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to help a friend in need who had waded in too deep with a contract he has. He has no database experience, and was trying to customize a Wordpress plugin that uses PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. So I downloaded the daily build of the PHP bundle of NetBeans for 6.5 and started working.

He happily notes that things like syntax highlighting, inline documentation and completion were still there in the PHP bundle as well. He also mentions a few other things that could come in handy for the IDE - ssh tunnel support (see here), an "Add Column Wizard" and a "Insert DLL Wizard".

OCI 1.3.4, with the changes I mentioned in my last post, is now available on PECL: http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.

He also mentions the work on the Windows version of the extension that he's been up to with the plan to make two OCI8 DLL releases for the future - one using 10g libraries and the other using 11g.

Your PC can be turned into a fully capable Web development environment, by installing those three technologies, and configuring them so they communicate with one another. Admittedly, you can simply install and use PHP for its command-line processing. But for creating and testing dynamically generated Web pages on your local machine, then Apache needs to be already installed and working.

If you're wanting to set that part up before you get started and aren't sure how, check out the other tutorial to get started. He works through the process with you, including screenshots of the installer and how to toss MySQL in to the mix.

Antony Dovgal took a snapshot of the OCI8 extension that shipped with PHP 5.2.4 and bundled it up standalone in PECL as OCI8 1.2.4. Windows binaries are here.

Fixes included in this packages DLL include:

• statement caching
• LOB functionality
• error handling methods

I came across this great open source project that allows you to convert your php scripts to a fast/cgi executable that can be executed by any web server that supports it (including apache and IIS).

Roadsend is a native compiler for PHP that converts scripts into free-standing binaries and can be used for building both online and offline applications.

Since the main PHP 4 distribution cannot be updated with the latest MySQL libs for various reasons, I will provide downloads of the latest PHP 4 with the latest MySQL libs.

His archive contains two files, both DLLs to replace the MySQL libraries that already exist.