On the Developer Tutorials blog today, Akash Mehta has posted the second part of his look at the "ultimate web development environment", a continuation from this previous part.

Today I'm going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.

Tools mentioned this time include things like a local development server (invaluable) some PHP configuration tips and the editors they mentioned, things like Aptana, Eclipse and Zend Studio.

On the Tiger Heron blog, there's a continuation of the series that Tony Freixas has been writing to following the beginning steps of working with PHP. First there was the download/install, then setting up a development environment. This time, he actually gets around to writing a bit of basic code.

Specifically, I will describe how I boot my PHP scripts and why I boot them the way I do. Part 1 shows how my requirements for code portability and maintainability influence the boot process. Part 2 will go into more detail about the specific steps executed by the boot code.

His basic task for the first example is to make a templating sort of system, calling a Navigation class to output links in list items. He outlines the goals of the project, what he's found for his current solution and some alternatives he's discovered along the way.

On the O'Reilly PHP blog (ONLamp.com), there's a new post by Michael Ross with an overview of the popular PHP IDE from Zend, their Zend Studio for Eclipse:

Zend Studio for Eclipse is the company's latest update of its PHP IDE, and carries a version number of 6.0. As a foundation, it uses Eclipse, an extensible open source platform for software development that is growing in functionality and widespread usage every year. It also utilizes the PHP Development Tools (PDT) framework.

He looks at the product from all sides - the releases of the products, requirements, pricing, installation and an overview of the interface (complete with screenshots). He also mentions other features that come bundled with the editor like testing integration, file/version management and a built in debugger (as well as special support for the Zend Framework).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode 8 of their ZendCon Sessions series podcast today - Shahar Evron's talk on methods for creating scalable development environments:

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Shahar Evron present "Building Scalable Development Environments".

The standard three methods for listening to the episode apply - subscribe to the feed, download the mp3 or just visit the page and use the built-in player.