If you want to start using Composer components in your application there is no reason why you should not. The code is mainly PHP 5.3 but by slowing moving the majority of your application from framework specific code to generic packages that work in any framework you free yourself from being limited to a specific framework and will find a transition to FuelPHP 2.0, Laravel or Symfony2 much easier in the future.

There's four steps to his process (most of them the usual Composer setup ones): install Composer, create the "composer.json" file, install the needed dependencies and then include_once the Composer autoloader.

I have been working on a little pet project and wanted to put it up somewhere to show to a few people how it was going. I wanted something really simple so I decided to give the PHP PaaS solutions a try. Its a very simple Symfony 2.1 based app using Composer for vendor management, so I went on a quest to see what could be done and how.

He shares the contents of his Boxfile (a special file PagodaBox uses to configure your application) with entries for writeable directories, extensions to load and the database configuration. He found that, during deployment, everything is writeable by the "build" user, so there's no worries about installing Composer dependencies.

I have started working with Ubuntu 11.10 and my first task was to install PHP, Apache and MySQL in that. This is because without these three things computer is useless for PHP Developer. So Here I am sharing this article which shows how to install PHP, MySQL and Apache and configure with each other. This would be very useful for newbies, who have just jumped into web developing.

The process mostly consists of installing a few packages - mysql-server, mysql-client, apache2, php5 libapache2-mod-php5 (as well as several others for various PHP extension support) - and starting up the default Apache server.

The main package source used by Composer seems more similar to the usage of git submodules at a first glance: a list of dependencies on other projects is specified and stored under version control, and upon a checkout these projects are grabbed directly from their repositories.

He talks about what problem the project solves, what issues he's found with it so far (the amount of stuff downloaded for each dependency, the single point of failure of the one Packagist repository) and shows how to get it installed and creating a sample "composer.json" file for an example project.

On the back of a CIConf in London last month, I would like to delve a little into a common theme amongst CodeIgniter developers. Speeding up development through simple automation. To do that we're going to take a look at the CodeIgniter Sparks project and how it can drastically speed up your development. To demonstrate, I will walk through building a little portfolio that leeches off the GitHub API.

They show you how to install it from the Getsparks website, finding Sparks to add to your application, the code to load in the component and configuring it on load. They include an example of loading in a REST client Spark and how to use it to make a request to Github and pull down a Markdown file.

Ran into this issue when setting up a new VPS for AutoRidge. This happens when using Nginx and PHP-FPM with PHP 5.3+ and the Suhosin patch when trying to run a PHP script using a PHAR package. From what I can gather, the Suhosin patch basically blocks PHP include/require functions from executing files ending with .phar, which results in a PHP segfault that leaves no trace of any error at all.

His solution is a pretty simple one - edit the "suhosin.ini" file to allow for the opening of includes in phar files (suhosin.executor.include.whitelist). You can find out more about the Suhosin security tool on the project's website.

As the interest seems to be there, I thought it would be a great idea to follow up with a post taking you step by step through how I've set up Sublime Text 2 for PHP development, and showing you some of the useful features that you get out of the box with Sublime Text 2.

He's come up with some screencasts of his setup so you can see the useful features in action. He points out a few things to install or that use can use to make your development simpler:

• Package Control
• the Soda theme
• how to edit user preferences
• using the "Goto Anything" bar
• using the PHP snippets plugin
• DocBlockr for documentation blocks
• Sublime linter
• Goto Documentation

...and much more. This flexible editor makes it easy to customize just about everything in your environment and with more and more plugins/packages popping up all the time, there's a good chance the feature you need will be introduced soon.

This is something experimental I have been working on for our chef deployments. So the objective was/is to find a sane way to install PEAR packages and install dependencies with composer.

He shows how to set up the configuration script to discover a new PEAR channel, make the chef script not "fail hard" if a command returns a failed response code (as PEAR will do if the channel is already discovered). The "ignore_failure" configuration directive comes in handy for this. He also shows how to implement a LWRP in chef for both a PEAR and Composer resource.

You can find the code for this and other cookbook examples on his github account.

This weekend we have been busy hacking on Composer in our office together with Nils Adermann and Volker Dusch. We wanted to push the project forward a bit faster than the odd free evenings usually allow, and I would now like to introduce the changes we made.

Their updates include mentions of:

• Changes to the "dev" version handling
• Major bugfixing in the dependency resolver
• More project documentation
• GitHub integration with Packagist (allowing you to directly update the Packagist site when you push a new version)
• A cleanup on the repository creation process (see here)

PHAR ("Php ARchive") is analogous to the JAR file concept but for PHP. If you have PHP 5.3 or greater, the Phar extension is built-in and enabled; you can start using it without any additional requirements. This article is intended to shed some light on this important feature for those who haven't used it before. Hopefully you'll find it a very helpful tool and have a better and faster deployment experience.

They show you how to create a sample project to build the phar from - a simple application that prints out a message and the contents of a configuration file. Code is included to help you build the phar file and how to define the stub file to pull in your application's files and folder.