PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted that introduces you to a build tool that's more common in the Java world but can easily support PHP projects, Apache's Maven.

Apache Maven is a build automation tool with the purpose of building, reporting, and creating documentation of projects. It builds projects using a Project Object Model (POM) and a set of plugins shared by all projects using Maven, thus providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds, you automatically know how all Maven projects build. [...] Through this article you will gain familiarity with Maven for PHP, and how to install and use the PHP-Maven plugin from the command line and in Eclipse.

The tutorial walks you first through the basic install of Maven and get you started with an example "settings.xml" file helping to set up the PHP-Maven plugin. They help you create your first project using the Archetype plugin and its related "pom.xml" file. The project already has a defined structure (similar to what you might see in a Composer-loadable PHP repo on Github) for the source of your app and the tests. They show you how to hook in PHPUnit and phpDocumentor for testing/dcumentation builds and, finally, how to integrate it all into Eclipse to allow for easier, in-IDE interactions.

Chris Jones has a new post to his Oracle blog today talking about the new "opcode" opcode caching that's going to be built into future PHP versions This is the implementation of the Zend Optimizer+ opcode caching in a native language interface. The latest PHP 5.5 snapshots have it included.

The new "opcache" can be seen as substitute for the venerable APC cache, the maintenance of which had become an issue. Note: although opcache is now readily available, there is currently nothing preventing you from using any available (working!) opcode cache in PHP 5.5.

He gives you a quick guide to getting this new opcode caching enabled and compiled into a shiny new download of the PHP 5.5.x branch. You'll need a special command line flag on the compile and to update your php.ini to load the needed shares module. You can also use it if you're on PHP 5.2 or higher either by compiling this source or using this PECL extension.

Aaron Pollock has posted a detailed guide that will help you get a full PHP development environment set up on a VPS, complete with a domain name and self-signed certificate.

I've been developing PHP apps for over eleven years. PHP remains 85% of what I do on a daily basis. Over that time, I've tried lots of WAMP packages to run sites on my Windows computers and, since going Mac, I've used the native Apache install that comes with Mac OS X. Six months ago, I decided to try out a remote VPS for my development. The results have been so good that I forget the pain I used to experience on a daily basis doing it any other way.

He walks you through the entire process (you'll need a VPS first) - it uses an Ubuntu-based setup, but the instructions are relatively easy to port over to other distributions. He helps you set up the system's hostname, install all needed packages/tools and generate the wildcard self-signed SSL certificate. Finally, he shows how to configure Apache's virtual hosts and set up a basic site.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial introducing you to Zend Framework v2:

When I started writing for PHPMaster, my first article was about Zend Framework. Since then, the framework has released version 2 stable. Apart from the name, version 2 is really a new project compared to the older version; ZF has been totally rewritten. In this article I'll give you an overview of the new features and the changes that have been introduced.

The article talks about introductory things like getting the framework installed (via a few methods, like Composer) and how the autoloader works with the file/namespace structure. They also talk about the dependencies that come with the framework and the event manager, one of the most powerful parts of the framework.

In a previous post Pablo Viquez talked about integrating JMeter and Zend Debugger for testing your PHP applications. In this new post he goes one more step in and talks about integrating Eclipse, JMeter and using XDebug this time for the debugging.

In a previous post I wrote about doing step by step debugging using Zend Debugger and Zend Studio making the calls from JMeter, however not everyone has Zend Server or Zend Studio installed, and since XDebug is an awesome project I though that will be awesome to do the same using XDebug. [...] As explained previously, using the browser for API debugging can be pretty hard or nearly impossible unless you build some sort of UI, which normally I do not have time to do, so JMeter is perfect for the job!

He includes the configuration changes that'll need to be made to Apache and how to set up and configure the new project in Eclipse. He also includes the setup of the jMeter plan (using his example) and executing it to execute the script/get the debugging information.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to effectively debug your applications with Xdebug, a handy tool that provides more detail around your errors just by installing it.

Xdebug is a free and open source project by Derick Rethans and is probably one of the most useful PHP extensions. It provides more than just basic debugging support, but also stack traces, profiling, code coverage, and so on. In this article you'll see how to install and configure Xdebug, how to debug your PHP application from Netbeans, and how to read a profiling report in KCachegrind.

He walks you through the installation process (installing it from a package, not compiling) and how to enable it in your "php.ini" configuration file. He also shows how to hook it into the debugger on your IDE (in this case Netbeans) to receive debug messages and be able to step through the code to easily locate the issues. Also included is some basic information about profiling your application and viewing the resulting data in something like Kcachegrind or Webgrind

Pablo Viquez has a new post to his site today showing you how to debug your PHP code with the help of JMeter (an Apache project) that tests functional behavior and performance and the Zend Debugger.

Now, I think JMeter is awesome, no doubt about it, however what if I want to test something while developing a new API Endpoint? well I used to be accustom to the nasty var_dump(); exit; combination or if the API was already completed I used to do error_log() everywhere and figure out the results. [...] I love the easy integration that Zend Server has with Zend Studio for debugging and I though to myself, why not just change the client that triggers the debugging console so instead of the browser use JMeter, at the end both uses HTTP so it should work, well guess what, IT DOES, and It's awesome. No more print_r, error_log, var_dump in the API, lets do the Step by Step debugging with JMeter!

He walks you through the steps needed to get it all set up and working together, complete with screenshots. Really, you can use whatever debugger setup you prefer (with something like Xdebug) and have jMeter execute on top of that - there's no interface directly between the debugger and jMeter.

New on the "Do It Yourself!" web development site, there's a post showing you how to setup Composer on Windows to manage the dependencies in your applications.

Composer exists to overcome the problem [with PECL and PEAR being system-wide], composer is a dependencies manager that come in a form of command utilities, composer make it possible to 'plug and play' PHP packages across application no matter what frameworks we are using as long as the packages follow the shared format. With composer we can define our project dependencies simply in a 'composer.json' file, and later on we can install and update these dependencies automatically.

He introduces the Composer tool and then shows how to set it up via the Windows installer (with screenshots). There's two ways to set it up - "Basic" that does the install in one project and "Global" that installs it somewhere outside of the current project, available to all projects.

Juan Treminio has a new post to his site today talking about Composer and namespacing and shows you how the two work together to make using 3rd party tools easy.

You've heard of Composer, right? The nifty new tool for PHP that aims to centralize and streamline package management? Do you also know of, but don't really understand how namespaces work in PHP? Then let's set you straight! In 5 minutes you'll learn how Composer's autoloader and namespaces work!

He's broken it up into a few sections:

• Getting Composer up and running
• Making a basic "composer.json" file
• Going through what the "install" creates (including the "autoload_namespaces.php" file)
• Using the vendor/ autoloader

As a bonus, he also shows how to implement your own namespacing in the "composer.json" file if you have a special case - just use the "autoload" section in the configuration (examples included).

If you're a git user and have thought about bringing things a bit more "in-house" than GitHub but still want some of the perks of the web-based interface, this quick tutorial from PHPMaster about installing Gitlist might interest you.

aking your repositories available in a local intranet is pretty easy, but having a nice interface to interact with those repositories, making collaboration between teams easier, is not that simple. [...] There are other solutions available, but some are too hard to install or, again, hard on the eyes. I recently discovered GitList, a free and open source Git repository viewer. It's interface resembles GitHub a lot but aims to keep everything simple and clear.

He includes the basic installation steps you'll need to get it up and running - setting up the environment, downloading and configuring Gitlist to look at your repositories and pointing out that, since the LESS source is included in the download, you can customize it how you see fit.