One of the cooler features of the new PHP 5.4 release is a built-in web server designed specifically for development and testing. Now you can write and test your code without having to have a full-fledged LAMP configuration - just launch a the built-in server from the command line, test your code, and then shut it down when you're finished. [...] In this article I'll explain some basic uses of the new built-in server and show you how to build a portable personal development server useful for quickly testing your applications

He starts with a look at how to start up the web server (a simple command line switch and host/port definition) and the resulting default phpinfo page it displays. Other options include the ability to specify a document root for your server and create a sort of "front controller" for it to route requests. They show how to create a simple application based on this that can dynamically load in the index file, a router and pass the request off to the correct file. Their example includes some "niceties" too like logging, "hosts allowed" and checks for requesting directories.

You can find their full code for this example over on github.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

The code pulls from the defined user's "recenttracks" feed and parses it (via a simplexml_load_string call) into an object that's looped through and outputted. Data that comes back from the feed includes artist anme, name of the track, a URL to more information about it and an image of the album cover. He also includes an updated version that caches the data for three minutes so it's not always relying on the last.fm servers to be there.