Ralph Schindler has a new post to his blog today detailing the process you'll need to compile Gearman (or just about anything) on a Zend Server CE install on Snow Leopard.

Zend Server CE for Mac (as of this writing), comes compiled as an i386 executable only. This includes the PHP binary, php library, and apache binaries that come shipped with ZSCE. While ZSCE works great out the box with all the provided extensions, you might find that you want some additional 3rd party PHP extensions compiled/linked into this stack. That's where things get a little confusing, and in this post, we'll look at how to install the gearman extension.

He give two methods - the easy way where you can export a CFLAGS setting to compile with multiple architectures or the harder way (that works for Gearman), building static libraries. The full list of commands (and some example output) is included in the post. In the comments there's also an example of the install if you're using Macports.

Fabien Potencier has been moving over to the Mac OSX platform for some of his development and figured out that he needed a custom installation of PHP 5.3, different than the one that comes with the default install of Snow Leopard. The process was a bit tricky, so he's written up a post as a guide for those wanting to do it too.

To do my work, I need to have several different versions of PHP at hand, with different configurations, and so I always compile my own PHP and Apache binaries on my Mac. [...] Now that I use PHP 5.3.0 more and more, I decided it was time to compile my own version. As it turns out, compiling PHP 5.3.0 on Snow Leopard is a bit involving.

He walks you through the configure command he used, how he patched the iconv.c file, patch the source of PHP with the change and recompile with an EXTRA_LIBs environment variable set. The steps he followed were based on the hints provided in this bug from the PHP.net website.

On the Nefarious Designs blog today, there's a new post stepping you through every step you'll need (yes, every single one) to get multiple virtual development environments set up with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, Django, CouchDB and Twisted.

Since I've started doing all of my development on virtual machines, I began thinking about my development workflow: In theory, I should be able to model the perfect server environment virtually. I wasn't sure what environment I wanted to end up with, but I had a good idea what basic virtual machines I wanted as a starting layout.

He sets up three different environments - development, staging a production - all with the same packages and all built on a base Ubuntu virtual machine. By cloning your customized version, you can built out as many instances as you'd like and tweak each for their intent.

If you've been shopping around for a new IDE to use in your development, you might want to check out this new article from NETTUTS.com showing eighteen popular IDEs for several different platforms (Win/Mac/Linux).

Last week we looked at 22 Neat Editors for Windows. But sometimes, a code editor simply isn't enough, especially when you're working with things like databases and classes. Which IDE will you prefer? Hopefully you'll find it below!

IDEs that made the list include:

• Visual Web Developer
• PHPEdit
• Expression Web
• Coda
• Eclipse
• Aptana Studio

Juozas Kaziukenas has reposted a video created by the RailsEmnvy.com folks (one of several, check out YouTube for more) that does a "Mac vs PC" Apple parody commercial of Ruby and PHP.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

Other videos include Ruby on Rails vs .NET, Ruby on Rails vs Django and, of course, Ruby on Rails vs ColdFusion.

With the recent release of the Zend Server CE (Community Edition) software from Zend, several PHPers around the community have been trying it out and posting some of their experiences. Brandon Savage has posted some of his thoughts on the release as he tried out the Mac OS X version.

There are many good things in this product. Among them, is the ability to easily activate and deactivate most of the plugins and extensions that come bundled with PHP by default. [...] Unfortunately, the problem also contains many what I would call "bugs" or usability enhancements that are simply not there.

A few of the things that made his bad list included: a lacking install process (too long?), the lack of an obvious logging tool and a different sort of checking for setting directives (a check against a regular expression?)

He found some good in the release too - the easy to install extensions, the number of extensions it comes bundled with and the inclusion of MySQL with the stack. He notes he won't be abandoning his typical install (like MAMP/XAMPP) over this tool - at least not for right now.

Having a development environment on a remote machine (maybe production, maybe test) is nice, but sometimes you just need the speed and simplicity that something a bit more local can give you. Vid Luther talks about setting up just such a local development environment on your Mac. (Sorry Windows guys - maybe check out WAMP)

This post is for the techies who know me, and are switching. Some are coming from Windows, some from Linux, some are designers who need to do some local development. So, I'll try to keep this post as simple as possible, and perhaps more like a tutorial, where you can "copy and paste" commands and files.

He recommends a few pieces of software that you'll need - things like XAMPP and MySQL - and some other "nice to haves" like TextMate, Subversion and Expandrive. He shows how to set up the shell environment, create virtual hosts and add them into the /etc/hosts file so they'll resolve locally.

Raphael Stolt has a new blog post looking at the installation of a relatively new component in the Zend Framework toolset - Zend_Tool - on an OS X machine.

Yesterday I decided to tiptoe into the development of custom Zend_Tool Providers as the introductional article series by Ralph Schindler motivated me to learn more about it and I already have some useful use cases on my mind. Therefor I prior had to install the Zend_Tool component and it's driving CLI scripts on my MacBook.

Its a three step processes to get things up and running:

• Fetching and installing the Zend_Tool component
• Putting the Zend_Tool CLI scripts to work
• Checking the installation

The tricks is to get everything installed in the right place and to add the links to directories where they're needed. Once its installed a simple "zf show version" command will let you know its all working correctly.

Tony Bibbs has posted a new tutorial to the Oracle Technology Network website for all of the Oracle & Mac users out there - Installing PHP 5.2 for Oracle on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

If you've ever attended a PHP conference, you might have thought that Apple was a sponsor based on all the Mac laptops you saw. Many of the PHP developers toting Macs are running Linux as a virtual machine but more and more PHP developers work natively on the Mac. Recognizing this fact, Oracle has made it downright easy to develop PHP/Oracle applications on the Mac. In this guide I'll show just how easy it is to get your Mac setup to build Oracle-based PHP applications.

His method requires that you have access to a server already running Oracle (even the Express Edition will do), XCode and either Fink or MacPorts (optional). His setup is to use the Oracle installation inside of a virtual machine to get the needed libraries from to build PHP correctly. He even includes some screenshots of the Parallels installation of Kubuntu and some test code to ensure things are working as they should.

In a recent post to his blog Christoph Dorn shows off a cool little trick to getting your Mac to respond to your (vocal) request for website stats from FeedBurner.

You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.

His better way involves tying together the speech recognition that OS X offers, the "say" command line tool and a PHP5 script that can go out and read/parse the FeedBurner XML information for your website. Throw in a little command line script and some set up in the Speech tools and you have a handy little script that can fetch your latest stat information just from your request.