In this recent post to his blog Stefan Koopmanschap shares some of the troubles (and a solution) when he was dealing with getting the Geoip PECL extension installed on his Zend Server setup in OSX.

Today I needed to get a client application up and running on my local system. This application uses the Geoip PECL package, so I needed to get this up and running. This turned out to be slightly more difficult than just a PECL install, as you're missing some libraries by default, so here is my log of things to do to get it up and running.

He gives the complete list of steps his followed including downloading the source and his way around this "System could not load this extension" issue. The trick was to recompile the source with the correct architecture. By default his extension was built with i386 instead of 64-bit but updating some of the CFLAGS settings (and a few other environment variables) got things compiling correctly.

New on his blog today Matthew Turland has posted about a "gotcha" he came across when working with cURL to pull down information (scrape content) from a remote .NET application.

I recently wrote a PHP script to scrape data from a .NET application. In the process of developing this script, I noticed something interesting that I thought I'd share. In this case, I was using the cURL extension, but the tip isn't necessarily specific to that. One thing my script did was submit a POST request to simulate a form submission. [...] The issue I ran into had to do with a behavior of the CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS setting that's easy to overlook.

The problem was something cURL does automatically - change the header for the content type because you're sending an array. Thankfully, with the help of a call to http_build_query to encode it correctly, the request will use the right headers.

Ant Phillips looks a bit at some interoperability between the PHP and Project Zero when to comes to using the COM/.NET extension.

Zero doesn't currently support the COM/.NET extension in PHP. No matter though, there is a handy open source project called JACOB that bridges between Java and COM/.NET. In fact, there is an easier way to do this using a Groovy library called Scriptom. This is really just a friendly wrapper around JACOB to provide a better syntax for calling methods and accessing properties.

He also includes a quick introduction and howto on getting the functionality up and working in a Windows environment - download, add the JAR to your path, edit your php.ini and copy and paste some example code in to see it in action.

Asvin Balloo has posted the second part of his geolocate with PHP tutorial series - using the mapping information gathered from the previous article to plot them on a map.

In the first part of this series I showed how you could get the country of a visitor via his IP address. Now with this precious information, I'll show you how to map the visitor visually on the world map using Google Maps.

The full code is provided - the PHP to pull the latitude/longitude information from the GeoIP library and the Javascript to get the Google Map to plot the point. You can check out the live demo for an example or just grab the source and try it out for yourself.

On his blog today Asvin Balloo has posted the first part of his look at his method for geolocating the visitors to your website using the PEAR GeoIP package and the MaxMind GeoLite Country information.

In this first part, he just makes sure that you have what you need installed before really getting started. Brief installation instructions are provided and example code is included to make sure things are up and working correctly (a lookup for whatever IP you're coming from).

It uses the lookupCountryName method to translate the information based on the MaxMind data.

On the Developer Tutorials site, there's an article talking about the integration that can be made with PHP6 and .NET Visual Studio:

PHP, .net and Silverlight will be integrated out of the box, along with Visual Studio 2008. The project has long been in the works, but our sources have informed us of an impending announcement that PHP 6 will ship with .net.

The glue between them is a part of the phlanger project.

The Developer Tutorials blog has a new article that talks about their method for creating simple geotargeting for your visitors.

In this tutorial, we'll take a look at the technique of geotargeting, or serving content to users based on their physical location. The technology is invaluable; with simple techniques, you can target advertising to specific users, collect more accurate usage statistics, serve content in different languages for different regions and provide local information like weather reports to your visitors.

They use the GeoIP services offered by Maxmind to perform the IP to location translation and the PEAR package already created to make the integration as painless as possible.

A new post to the php.evangelism mailing list has started up a great discussion on something that a lot of users seem to be in favor of - trying to get PHP accepted by Microsoft to be included in its Dynamic Language Runtime environment.

From the inital post:

I am wondering why there isn't any effort in the PHP community to get PHP into the DLR. If nothing, DLR is yet another platform, and for a php programmer it gives one more playground to showcase his skillset. Anyway, my question is whether there would be any community effort to get MS adopt PHP into CLR too. I am sure there is a genuine customer requirement, and enterprises have made quite a bit of investment in PHP and they would all love to be able to take it to the .NET platform.

Responses so far include the pointing out of problems, possibilities like a Zend collaboration and lots of talk on what such a project would entail.

On the WebDigity.com website, there's a quick how-to on using geo-targeting on your website with a combination of a geolocation database and a PHP module to parse it.

There are many cases that we need to display different content to our users depending on the location that they are visiting our site. In this tutorial we will give some examples regarding geo targeting with php.

They got their geolocation database from Maxmind and loaded up this module to make it as simple as a call to geoip_open and geoip_country_code_by_addr to get the location of the remote user.

eWeek reports today that Microsoft is taking the first steps toward extending its support for other scripting languages with a new project to ry to run PHP on .NET.

Known as Phalanger, the project reached Version 2.0 Beta 2 on July 30.

The primary goal of the project, released under Microsoft Shared Source Permissive License, is to enable full functionality of existing PHP scripts on .Net without any modification, Microsoft said. Unlike the original PHP interpreter, Phalanger compiles scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language).

The article goes on to talk about the project, the advantages it has over previous attempts, and where it's headed in the future. You can check out the CodePlex site here.