On the WoorkUp.com blog today Luiz Eduardo has posted a new tutorial about how you can create and add a "Google Instant" type of search to your site. The technique uses a combination of an HTML and Javascript frontend (jQuery) and a PHP backend.

This technology is not available for every webmaster in your own page yet, however, we can get really good results with php and jQuery, allowing everyone to create your own version of instant search. We are going to create now the simplest code, in order to learn how it works. This way anyone may learn easily and recreate it, fitting it perfectly with your own project.

He includes all of the code you'll need - the HTML frontend form for searching, the javascript to run the search each time a new letter is added or removed, the PHP to pull the results out of a database and even some CSS to help you correctly style the results box to the right place.

Gennady Feldman recently spent some time doing some upgrades on his Oracle servers and, in doing so had a chance to work with the latest release of their Instant Client and how it interacts with the OCI8 extension's API.

I was recently involved in upgrading our Application servers to the latest Oracle Instant Client 11.g (11.2.0.1) including installing the latest PHP OCI8 module (1.4.1). Currently Oracle provides binaries for Linux in RPM and ZIP(?) format. (Side note: It still puzzles me as to why Oracle uses ZIP files for Linux binaries as ZIP is common to Windows and is not always available or generally used on Linux.)

He had everything prepared for the move and thought things would go smoothly during the upgrade but was surprised by a few things - the RPMs that Oracle gives are broken, an issue on the pecl update for the oci8 extension and a problem that came up with dependencies and packages for the Instant Client.

Chris Jones has a recommendation for those compiling Oracle support into PHP - there's a simple way to reduce the amount of disk space that your Instant Client install uses - a "only what's needed" setup.

Most PHP OCI8 users link PHP with the Oracle Instant Client (IC) libraries that handle the underlying "client" (i.e PHP OCI8 extension) communication with the database. IC is relatively small for the features it gives, and is very easy to install. A ZIP or RPM download unpacks a few libraries. [...] Although IC isn't particularly big - and it's getting relatively smaller all the time - there are two ways to reduce its size.

His two recommendations are to use the lite client version instead of the full-blown one (only has common character sets) or you can just remove the JDBC/ODBC/OCCI libraries from the full install. He lists out the files that are actually needed by the OCI8 extension to compile correctly.

Chris Jones has written up a guide for getting the Oracle Instant Client and PHP up and working on Linux and Windows.

Oracle 11g Instant Client is the easiest way to connect PHP to a remote Oracle database. This notes describes how to install PHP with the OCI8 Extension and Oracle Instant Client on Windows and Linux. The free The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual contains more detail and explains other installation options.

The guide walks you through enabling the PHP OCI8 Extension on Windows/Linux, verifying that its correctly installed and making a sample request to the remote Oracle database.

On NETTUTS.com a recent tutorial has been posted about the integration of your PHP application with PayPal's Instant Payment Notification system.

Today we are going to combine Paypal with PHP to allow for the easy processing of payments on your website.

You'll need a Premier PayPal Account to get it all working as well as already have a server with a working PHP installation (there's no setup and install for that in this tutorial). There's ten different steps in the process and screenshots and code are provided the whole way:

• Creating a PayPal Account
• Enable IPN
• Building a Simple HTML Page
• Building a PayPal Button
• Writing ipn.php
• Creating the Database
• Account Creation
• Emailing the Login Credentials
• Invalid Payment Email
• User Login

Chris Jones has a quick note concerning the update in version of the PHP packages for their Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution:

I've updated the PHP RPMs on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/ and released PHP 5.2.8 RPMs with the OCI8 extension for Oracle Enterprise Linux (i.e Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 4.7 and 5.2 on 32 and 64 bit platforms.

The packages were built for Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.7 on the x86 platform (but will also install on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server). The three major components - command line, CGI interface and Apache module - are all included as well as several standard PHP extensions. The install will require that you have the Oracle Instant Client installed.

Christopher Jones has posted about the latest Instant Client release for the Intel chips running OS X:

Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.

The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.

The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.

Christopher Jones talks today on his blog about a bug he's just corrected and integrated into the release of the Oracle Instant Client that lets PHP correctly take advantage of the temporary LOBS functionality.

When PHP is done with the temporary LOB, it needs to tell Oracle to destroy it. If this isn't done, then the temporary LOB will hang around using DB space until the connection is closed. I just merged a fix worked on by Krishna Mohan and myself for bug 43497.

Example code is included showing two instances of its use - a normal use that frees the memory correctly and the other showing how to create the temporary lob to hold the data as needed.

Maggie Nelson has linked to a blog post detailing one of the simplest ways to get a powerful database system, Oracle, up and working with PHP:

This is something that I wanted to post up for a while, because this is rather simple stuff and yet it took me a while to put this whole thing together for my own use/setup. It's also something that got some people interested and they asked me to post this up. So this post is for Maggie Nelson who is an active PHP and Oracle advocate.

It's basically an eleven step process to get things up and working (on linux) and involves installing RPMs, editing config files, and configuring the PHP installation to pull in the Oracle module.

The HowToForge has posted a new tutorial that will guide you through the installation of a server with Apache, PHP, MySQL, and OCI8 Instant Client support.

There are many howtos on building Apache with PHP, MYSQL support, but it is very rare to find some document on OCI8 support with Apache Build [...] I was searching some installation document, there are few documents , but most of them are using either RPM version of packages or they are missing some of the essential steps.

He starts with his platform (IBM x system x86_64 bit server with RHEL 4 Update Level 4) and grabs the parts first - the instant client, then Apache, then PHP. MySQL is already installed on the machine and is included in the PHP build via the configure call. They provide all of the shell commands you'll need to get things working as well as any changes that might need to be made to the configuration files in the process.