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.