Artur Ejsmont has a recent post to his blog showing how to get a MongoDB PECL extension to compile in a 32bit OSX environment (Snow Leopard).

Here is a quick step by step guide on how to get mongodb and PHP5.2 mongo pecl extension going on your MacOSX in 32bit mode! NOTE: 32 bit mongodb binaries have 2GB address space limit so you wont be able to process too much on your laptop. You will still be able to code and connect to remote instances just fine.

His process includes five steps - well, eight if you count the optional "install MongoDB" ones too - complete with the commands you'll need to get things compiled, ready for copy and paste. You can find the MongoDB PECL package here.

In this recent post to his blog Stefan Koopmanschap shares some of the troubles (and a solution) when he was dealing with getting the Geoip PECL extension installed on his Zend Server setup in OSX.

Today I needed to get a client application up and running on my local system. This application uses the Geoip PECL package, so I needed to get this up and running. This turned out to be slightly more difficult than just a PECL install, as you're missing some libraries by default, so here is my log of things to do to get it up and running.

He gives the complete list of steps his followed including downloading the source and his way around this "System could not load this extension" issue. The trick was to recompile the source with the correct architecture. By default his extension was built with i386 instead of 64-bit but updating some of the CFLAGS settings (and a few other environment variables) got things compiling correctly.

Ariz Jacinto has written up a new post with the commands you'll need to get PHP up and runnign with MSSQL Server's native ODBC driver working on linux (accessible through PDO).

Last month, MS announced the preview release of SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, a 64-bit binary driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This is good news for companies using heterogenous platforms e.g. LAMP stack running a PHP application that connects to both MySQL and MSSQL Server. Meaning, these companies no longer have to use third-party drivers such as FreeTDS that MS doesn't support. Then a few days ago, MS released version 1 of the driver. I immediately downloaded the driver and recompiled PHP with it as a PDO (PHP Data Object) ODBC driver.

His process has five steps to it, including one for making a test script (code included) and another with a few gotchas/performance considerations to keep an eye out for when using the driver.

Ralph Schindler has a new post to his blog today detailing the process you'll need to compile Gearman (or just about anything) on a Zend Server CE install on Snow Leopard.

Zend Server CE for Mac (as of this writing), comes compiled as an i386 executable only. This includes the PHP binary, php library, and apache binaries that come shipped with ZSCE. While ZSCE works great out the box with all the provided extensions, you might find that you want some additional 3rd party PHP extensions compiled/linked into this stack. That's where things get a little confusing, and in this post, we'll look at how to install the gearman extension.

He give two methods - the easy way where you can export a CFLAGS setting to compile with multiple architectures or the harder way (that works for Gearman), building static libraries. The full list of commands (and some example output) is included in the post. In the comments there's also an example of the install if you're using Macports.

On PHPClasses.org today the latest episode (#19) of the "Lately in PHP" podcast has been posted. In it Manual Lemos and Ernani Joppert: talk about the concept of a JIT (just in time) compiler for PHP (such as HipHop or Phalanger).

JIT compilation is the main topic of the episode 19 of the Lately in PHP podcast presented by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert who received as guests Miloslav Beno of the Phalanger team and Nuno Lopes of the PECL LLVM project to discuss this and other interesting topics of the PHP scene.

The hosts and their guests talk about compiling PHP, things that happened in 2011 and look forward to what's to come in the world of PHP in 2012. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to the podcast feed.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new post from Matthew Turland talking about PHP's quest for performance and some of the recent advancements that have made better performing applications even more possible.

While it's sufficient for many users, as PHP sees increased use by large sites like Wikipedia and Facebook, the ability to serve more requests on fewer servers becomes increasingly important. Some efforts have been made in this area in the last few years, both within and outside the PHP internals team. However, understanding exactly what's going on requires a bit of background both in history and concepts.

He goes through some of the origins of the PHP language (from the early days with Rasmus Lerdorf) to the fact that the PHP language itself is interpreted - complete with some of the overhead that comes with that. He also mentions various projects that have tried to compile PHP back down to C to increase performance like Roadsend, HipHop and, most recently, the HipHop virtual machine from Facebook.

In a new post to his blog Sebastian Bergmann takes a quick look at using a static analyzer, clang and scan-build, to analyze the PHP interpreter (specifically during the compile process).

I have been tinkering with CLANG's static analyzer lately. This post summarizes how I installed LLVM and CLANG and performed the analysis of a build of the PHP interpreter.

He includes all the commands (unix-based) to get the clang tools/libraries installed in the correct places as well as what to add to your $PATH to get the "scan-build" command to work with the make and make install parts of the PHP compile process.

Chance Garcia has a recent post to his blog showing how he fixed an issue with his MAMP install involving development of a SSH wrapper he developed and some testing out of PHPStorm and PHPUnit.

One thing I can say is that, even though I use a convenient app like MAMP PRO to set up my local development environment, I'm glad my sysadmin-fu is up to snuff enough to fly without the conveniences because after this ordeal, I feel like I might as well have made my MAMP stack from scratch with all the hoops I jumped tonight.

He shares a few of the things he discovered along the way like: the location of MAMP's "pecl" command, an error caused by a bad pear.conf file, doing custom compiles of PHP and libssh as a fallback and getting the extension to work in the CLI PHP version too.

Till Klampaeckel has a new post about replacing the now-missing phar port on FreeBSD installations with a custom compile work-around.

I noticed that archivers/pecl-phar vanished from the ports tree on one of my FreeBSD servers. Problem? Reasons to remove the port were: the port is unmaintained, the port was based on the outdated phar extension from pec and that phar (in pecl) contains open security issues. The simple solution is to create a new port which of course will use the phar which is bundled in PHP's core.

He includes the simple five or six step process you'll need to follow to compile your own phar extension for your installation - grabbing the latest source, compiling (configure/make) and putting the resulting shared object (.so) in the right place for PHP to find it. All that's left then is to enable it in the php.ini. Phar is an archive creation tool that (normally) comes bundled with versions of PHP and can be used to both read and write to compressed packages.

On DZone.com Giorgio Sironi has a new post talking about a development practice that's becoming more and more popular (rather than the old standby of one development platform for all developers) - using virtual machines as reusable, easily renewable platforms. He talks about the process he went through to set up PHP, including the commands used during the process.

This is an occasion to learn about a virtualization tool which I'm not familiar with, VirtualBox. The goal is to install PHP 5.4, which is not yet a stable release, to play around with new features such as traits without ruining the setup on my primary machine (which runs the super-stable PHP 5.3). Although it may be possible to run them together (I'm not a sysadmin), it's really simpler to install one of them in a virtual machine that can be thrown away if something goes wrong.

Using VirtualBox he describes the process of getting a Ubuntu system up and running including a custom compile of PHP with things like curl, bz2, mbstring and openssl support. With that installed and the Apache packages all set up, it should just be a matter of hitting your localhost's web server. If you're looking for older (or just other) versions of PHP to compile, check out the Historical Releases page on the PHP.net site.