Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

On the PHP Web Services blog today, Sami asks "what's missing from PHP's SOAP extension" that needs to be added or corrected.

PHP SOAP extension is good to get started, to play around with. However, it falls much short in meeting the enterprise demands in the SOA era.

He talks about things missing (like binary file features and lots of security features). He also notes something that most PHP developers love about the extension - the WSDL parsing that makes it so easy to simply call a remote service without having to go through the pain of hacking through it yourself.