Sebastian Bergmann has pointed out something obvious to anyone that's ever tried to work with unit tests in PHP - there's just not that much support for it. The software is there and waiting to be used, but too many developers just don't take advantage of it.

Maybe it took the PHP community a little longer to realize the importance of testing. But now that we know how to build applications that "just work", are fast and scalable, as well as secure, a big topic in the PHP community right now is to implement processes and use techniques that help us assure that the software works correctly throughout the its lifecycle.

He points to some comments made at a recent panel discussion about PHP and testing, the proliferation of frameworks for the language and the things that have no name that developers use every day to make their code "just work".

Chris Ravensroft has posted a quick guide to getting the Java-related web server, Tomcat, up and working with a PHP installation.

Sometimes, you want to run PHP with Tomcat. Why? Well, you may have a legacy product, for instance, that will require servlets for many more years. Or you may be using this gigantic Java program and are only interested in adding a tiny PHP piece on the side.

It's a pretty simple process and most of the steps are the standard "download, install, unpack" sorts of things. The important things are the web.xml document you create and the additions to the servlet.properties file to make the PHP module work.

A little while back Matthew Turland posted about something that some developers moving over to PHP from more strict languages have an issue with - variable typing - and how its evolved in languages over time.

Without a little background in programming languages or computer science in general, it's entirely possible that typing systems are not something that have crossed your mind. I thought I'd take a blog entry to share some of my thoughts on how it’s affecting the creation and evolution of languages.

He walks through history a bit, mentioning C, Java, Python and PHP and how they differ in their default type handling. He especially focuses on the "blurred line" between strong and weak typing and how some if offers special features to the language that uses the method.

Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).

The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time. This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.

The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.