On the Hauser & Wenz blog today, Christian Wenz points out a patched version of the interactive command line PHP client, phpa to work on a Mac OS X machine - phpa-norl.

phpa is an interactive command line shell for PHP by David Phillips. Stefan Fischerlander, usually known as a SEO expert and Perl admirer, has patched phpa for Mac OS X and Windows (the default builds theredo not seem to support a feature required by phpa). The result: phpa-norl. Stefan successfully ran this on OS X, and I could confirm that it runs on Windows, as well

He also mentions some features of the client including a history feature that makes looking back through previous commands simple.

Picking back up on his blog, Sean Coates shares a Dashboard widget he's created to do quick and dirty PHP interpreting on the fly:

I found myself using php -r on the command line to test some simple code snippets, and it occurred to me that this isn't "The Mac Way." So, following the excellent documentation at Apple, I managed to come up with something pretty useful in an afternoon.

His widget sits happily, ready to take in PHP code and output the result at the click of a button.

Mac OS X PHP developers, listen up - Greg Beaver has a word of advice for you about your default PEAR installation:

I won't get into the questionable business practice of shipping software with known security holes that have had known fixes for years. Instead, I would like to offer simple step-by-step instructions of how to upgrade from outdated buggy PEAR versions to the latest stable release, 1.5.0.

You're five simple steps away from having an upgraded installation, all using the built-in pear installer and go-pear functionality.