According to this article in The Register, more PHP developers (of the ones polled by Zend) prefer to do their actual development on a Windows platform, but still host their sites on something like Linux (as shown in the results of a Zend survey).

In a recent study from Zend Technologies, forty two per cent of PHP programmers named Windows as their primary development operating system. Linux came second, with 38.5 per cent, while Mac's OS X was third on 19.1 per cent. Zend did not say how many developers it spoke to, but called the December poll a "global survey" ranging from independent consultants to organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

The same survey shows that the choice of Linux for the server is still strong, and that the rest of the options (Windows, OS X) are trailing by a large percentage. You can read Zend's official press release on the survey on PRWeb.net.

If you're in or near the Dublin, Ireland area and are interested at all in developing web applications on Microsoft's Azure platform, you really should check out a new post on the EchoLibre blog with details on a presentation from Josh Holmes (of Microsoft) that'll be happening On February 21st.

As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric - in particular PHP and Ruby. [...] So, this month Microsoft are bringing Josh Holmes to Dublin to talk directly to Irish developers about building and deploying web apps on the Azure platform.

It's a free event and all who are interested are welcome to come. It'll start February 21st at 7:30pm (19:30) at the Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane. There's no charge for the event, but you still need to register to reserve a spot - there's only so much room, after all.

On the Xebee blog there's a recent post looking at test-driven development with the Zend Framework and PHPUnit. They show how they work well together and make it simpler to use TTD to create and test your applications.

Over the past few days I was going through the Zend Framework reference docs and I found myself pleasantly surprised with all that the latest version of this web application framework provides. [...] Out of the many new features, what stood out for me was the ease with which Zend Framework and PHPUnit complement and work with each other.

He talks about some of the features of PHPUnit (including dependencies, testing for exceptions and errors) and how it fits into a good deployment strategy. He shows how you can use the Zend_Test component of the framework, along with the Zend_Test_PHPUnit features, to make a sample test case. There's also an example of using the Zend_Test_PHPUnit_Db component to test database information and your backend data stores to compare them to a formatted XML document.

Vinu Thomas has pointed out two upcoming webinars from Zend that he thought sounded interesting - one talking about development best practices and the other on troubleshooting PHP applications.

From Zend on the development best/worst practices:

Have you ever wondered how you could advance your PHP development? Have you considered using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), an Issue Tracker or a Version Control tool, but were concerned about how complex it might be? Taking PHP development to the next level may be easier than you think.

From Zend on the troubleshooting techniques:

Understanding what's causing your PHP application to be slow or just break is often time-consuming, and almost always frustrating. Join this information-packed webinar, delivered by a senior Zend PHP consultant, to learn what techniques PHP professionals use for pinpointing PHP issues in development, testing and production

There are others happening this month as well including one on internationalization with the Zend Framework and a look at the Zend Server for IBM i.

In a new post to his blog today Derick Rethans talks about his move to what he calls his "PHP Development Environment 2.0" - an upgrade to some of his sites and servers prompted by an update of the Xdebug website.

I'd heard a lot about lighttpd and decided to give that a try - yes, that meant something that I didn't really know to well was going to run in a production environment. Unlike Apache, with lighttpd PHP doesn't run as a module, but instead you run it out of process with something called FastCGI.

He talks about his transition to this new web server and how he wanted to replace his current setup of having to use multiple static modules for PHP and having to recompile each time he wanted to use one of them. A few scripts later and a few modifications to the lighttpd configuration file later and he had a working installation with multiple versions of PHP running on multiple ports.

In this recent post to his blog Vinu Thomas touches on a few wrong ideas floating around about web application security (some specific to PHP) and tries to correct them.

When I talk to developers about security in web development, I usually get the answer that the security is taken care by the systems team by securing the server and by using the https protocol. In reality that is just the tip of the iceberg on security. There's much more you should do as a developer to incorporate security into your applications.

He points out that https doesn't secure your website, it only secures the communication between the client and server. You're still open to all of the usual attacks. Input validation can go a long way to helping to prevent this. He also mentions two insecure practices he's seen over and over - using file names in the URL parameters and using remote includes in an application (giving the remote site a direct line into your application's backend).

Brandon Savage has written up some thoughts on what can be a somewhat painful part of software development - creating the specification and schedule for the development of the application.

In the time that I have developed software, I don't know that I've ever met a developer who got excited about writing specs for anything. In fact, most developers loathe writing specs, or developing schedules of any kind. [...] Businesses need schedules to know when products will be finished and schedule things like trade shows, product launches, and write contracts with clients who need or want a particular product.

He has a few recommendations for things that could make the process a little easier including the fact that specs should not be considered documentation, that the developers should be the ones creating them and that scheduling out the development time line isn't all about the actual development.

In a new post to his blog Brandon Savage asks why some of the best development tools don't seem to be written in PHP.

Trac. CruiseControl. phpUnderControl. Jira. Bugzilla. These are all intensely popular development tools. And not a single one of them is written in PHP. Why? [...] Some might argue that PHP is a lesser language, and thus incapable of producing the results that Python and Java can produce. Others might argue that other languages are more mature. But the truth is that these applications don't exist in PHP simply because PHP wasn't previously capable of producing them.

He expresses a desire to work on some of these tools and to make them native to PHP, but several comments on the post steer him towards some projects that have already done this sort of thing including Xinc, ArbitTracker and sismo.

On his blog today Piotr Walczyszyn has posted a tutorial on getting an Eclipse instance set up with the PHP development tools (PDT) and a Flash Builder plugin to get ready for developing Flex and PHP applications.

In this tutorial I will explain how to configure development environment to work with PHP and Flex projects in one tool. In order to do that I will use Eclipse PDT 2.1 (PHP Eclipse plugin), Flash Builder 4 Plug-in Beta 2 and latest Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers package which is eclipse-jee-galileo-SR1-macosx-carbon (of course if you are on Windows you should get proper version instead) at the moment. Additionally I will use MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack), of course there are other possible solutions like WampServer for Windows, multiplatform XAMPP or Zend Server.

He links to all of the downloads for you (much appreciated) and walks you through the installation complete with screenshots and configuration settings you'll need to get things integrated.

Following some of his previous comments about the state of a certain publishing company, Keith Casey has come back with a a list of recommendations of books he'd suggest to both budding and seasoned developers alike.

I had a number of people ask what books I did I recommend. To be honest, that's one of the easiest questions I've gotten in a while. [...] There are about 5 books that I believe should be in nearly any software developer's library.

He actually includes two lists - one that's technology-agnostic (with titles like "The Pragmatic Programmer" and "Joel on Software") and a more software development centric list including "The Mythical Man Month" and "Producing Open Source Software".

You can also check out some of Travis Swicegood's opinions on reading material.