Brandon Savage has the first part of a series posted (with N parts) showing off some of the tools that PHP already has built in to make your debugging life easier.

PHP has a large number of tools for fixing bugs and resolving underlying issues. But many people don't know what they are, and some of them are extensions requiring installation in order to work. In this series, we'll explore some features for debugging PHP scripts, from the most basic to more advanced.

He looks at three of the most basic ones (and ones that most developers I know out there use every day) - var_dump, print_r and var_export. Examples of each in use are included...

Andi Gutmans has some great news for Ubuntu users - the Zend Framework will be included in a future version of the linux distribution (Hardy Heron, Ubntu 8).

We are very proud to be an integral part of the Ubuntu distribution going forward. This is an important step towards making Zend Framework accessible to a broader audience and by working closely with the MOTUs we are able to ensure a positive end-user experience.

Andi also points out some of the stats from the framework's life so far: 4M downloads of Zend Framework, 500K of them unique and only growing stronger.

Lee Underwood shares a handy bit of software in this quick article on Developer.com - a GUI program that helps you execute your PHP scripts on Windows without the setup time of something like XAMPP.

There's no need to install a server and PHP and then try to coordinate them in order to get them to work together. Script GUI comes in one compact package. It includes a server, which is only available to the built-in browser and is a nice security feature. In addition, it supports CGI, virtual hosts, directory aliases, custom error documents and understands most commands in .htaccess files.

He tell how it works (pretty much just install and go) and how it can be configured to work with virtual hosts. Best of all, it already comes with the latest version of PHP for Windows and can interface with several of the popular databases out there.

XMLWriter is finally bundled in php5. It will available and enabled by default in the next PHP release (5.1.2).

With XMLReader, XMLWriter is a really nice addition to the xml extensions.

The XMLWriter extension provides fast, non-cached, forward-only means of generating streams or files containing XML data.