Ariz Jacinto has written up a new post with the commands you'll need to get PHP up and runnign with MSSQL Server's native ODBC driver working on linux (accessible through PDO).

Last month, MS announced the preview release of SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, a 64-bit binary driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This is good news for companies using heterogenous platforms e.g. LAMP stack running a PHP application that connects to both MySQL and MSSQL Server. Meaning, these companies no longer have to use third-party drivers such as FreeTDS that MS doesn't support. Then a few days ago, MS released version 1 of the driver. I immediately downloaded the driver and recompiled PHP with it as a PDO (PHP Data Object) ODBC driver.

His process has five steps to it, including one for making a test script (code included) and another with a few gotchas/performance considerations to keep an eye out for when using the driver.

Fabien Potencier has posted another in his "getting better" series looking at the features that are included in the Symfony2 framework. In this new post he talks about the improvement annotation support.

Later today, I will release Symfony2 beta2. But first, I wanted to talk about a big change that landed into master yesterday. As you might know, Symfony2 uses annotations for Doctrine mapping information and validation configuration. Of course, it is entirely optional, and the same can be done with XML, YAML, or even PHP. But using annotations is convenient and allows you to define everything in the same file.

Two new bundles were added, SensioFrameworkExtraBundle and JMSSecurityExtraBundle, that let you use annotations in the controller for configuration. Examples of this new feature are included in the post giving the configuration settings a more "native" feel.

Shay Ben Moshe has put together a quick post today where he benchmarks array handling performance differences between PHP's native array and the newer SplFixedArray data structure that's a part of the Standard PHP Library that comes with any recent version of the language.

In PHP, arrays are one of the most fundamental data structures. We use them everywhere. They are very flexible, because they are implemented as associative arrays, and therefore let us use both string and integer keys. They are also unlimited in size, in most languages arrays are fixed-sized, but this is not the case in PHP. With that in mind, there still is a drawback. It damages performance. The solution for this problem may be SplFixedArray. But, it is not a perfect solution.

He points out two major differences - the SplFixedArray is, well, a fixed size and the fact that it can only use integer keys (no associative arrays here). He created three tests to compare the performance of the two:

• Writing data to the array
• Reading data from the array
• Getting a random value from the array

Each of these are measured in terms of runtime and/or memory usage. If you'd like to try out the tests for yourself, you can download the files needed. I won't cover the results of the tests here, though - you'll need to visit the post for that!

Kore Nordmann has put together some scripts that will let you create a native parallel job queue using only PHP (and the PCTNL extension).

To make use of multiple cores for some rather long processing operations I needed a way to fork multiple workers from a single PHP script multiple times lately. So I created a small project on github which implements this in a way, so that it should reusable by anybody. This is far from being rocket science, but still might be useful to someone out there.

He uses the ShellJobProvider (extended from JobProvider) to handle the creation of the tasks. His simple example just spawns off a few echo statements and pushes the results to some files. You can get these libraries from hos github account. You'll need PHP 5.3 and the PCTNL extension installed to get it working.

In a new post to his blog Brandon Savage asks why some of the best development tools don't seem to be written in PHP.

Trac. CruiseControl. phpUnderControl. Jira. Bugzilla. These are all intensely popular development tools. And not a single one of them is written in PHP. Why? [...] Some might argue that PHP is a lesser language, and thus incapable of producing the results that Python and Java can produce. Others might argue that other languages are more mature. But the truth is that these applications don't exist in PHP simply because PHP wasn't previously capable of producing them.

He expresses a desire to work on some of these tools and to make them native to PHP, but several comments on the post steer him towards some projects that have already done this sort of thing including Xinc, ArbitTracker and sismo.

Brandon Savage continues his introductory series on exception handling in PHP with this new post to his blog. This time the focus is on methods for nesting exceptions.

In the last two entries we have talked about the concept of layer abstraction: that is, that exceptions should not be allowed to pass out of one layer and into another. So, when an exception is raised in the database layer it should be caught in the controller. But how do we go about making sure that exceptions raised in the database layer are properly recorded and processed, ensuring that we have error logging and don't simply silence our exceptions?

He looks first at general exception nesting then at extending the base Exception class to write more nested code (inside a class). He also touches on the nested exceptions that were included in the latest release of the PHP 5.3 series.

DevShed has posted a new tutorial today (the start of a series) looking at using the filtering extension that comes native with PHP5 versions to clean up any data the user might give you.

Definitely, one of the most common tasks that PHP programmers have to tackle during the development of web applications is validating user-supplied data. [...] The use of native PHP filters may contribute significantly to saving time and effort when it comes to validating input data. In this series of articles I'm going to attempt to provide you with a concise guide to how to use them, as usual by way of a decent variety of code samples.

He starts off by looking at some of the filters that are available and show how to use one of them in a specific example - checking for integer values in a given input string.

In this new post to the Liip blog Tobias Ebnother looks at Jackalope that's looking to bring JCR functionality into the toolset offered to PHP developers.

We initiated a new open source project called Jackalope. Its purpose is to bring JCR via Jackrabbit to the PHP world. [...] JCR provides a great standardized storage for hierarchical content and supports some nice features like full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. Our main goal is to create a PHP Connector for Jackrabbit without using any Java.

To accomplish this, they're doing things in two steps. First, they've created a setup with the Java bridge (from Zend Server) to make the connection back to the Jackrabbit server and making writing tests to that API. The second step is to swap out the Java bridge with the Jackalope connection piece. You can check out the current state of the project on its Github page or come and ask questions of the team on the Freenode IRC network (#jackalope).

Juozas Kaziukenas (thanks to his work in the WinPHP Challenge) has posted his look at using the SQL native driver to allow the Zend Framework to interact with a MSSQL database backend.

Now some of these issues [that Stuart Herbert pointed out] are fixed, however Microsoft native Sql driver is still not used. [...] However, none of these is available in Zend Framwork. So my task now (because of Winphp competition) is to come up with something what can be used to connect to Microsft Sql database with the new driver.

He looks at how to set up two different options for a database configuration: with a PDO_ODBC adapter and an adapterNamespace setting to define the adapter type to use and the other with an MSSQL adapter type.

This new post on the PHP::Impact blog links to a Sun blog post about the MySQL driver that provides a more direct connection between your PHP instance and MySQL - mysqlnd.

Due to the tight integration into PHP 5.3 (and later), mysqlnd eliminates the dependency on the MySQL client programming support when the database extension(s) and the database driver are built with the support for mysqlnd. mysqlnd is not another PHP extension like mysqli nor it has an exposed API to the userland. It is a library that provides almost similar functionality as that of the MySQL client library, libmysql. mysqlnd and libmysql libraries implement the MySQL communication protocol - hence both of those libraries can be used to connect to the MySQL Server.

The Sun blog entry also walks you through the installation and configuration of a PHP instance with the native driver installed (with the upcoming PHP version, 5.3).