Via this post from Christopher Jones we learn about Kian Hui Teo's blog post talking about making the switch between the normal PHP 5.1.x installation and the Zend Core for Oracle.

This situation arises as I had installed Zend Core for Oracle (ZCO), and I wanted to try out some PDO functions. As ZCO comes with PHP 5.0.5, I was stuck, and PDO is only included from PHP 5.1.x onwards, I had to install PHP 5.1.x on my Windows box so that I can play with PDO. The assumption is that we have ZCO installed and working with a Apache2 server. I share the steps here on how to install another version of PHP so that it will co-exist peacefully with ZCO.

The post outlines a process to allow both the Zend Core and a normal installation of PHP 5.1.x to live peacefully (and still be able to switch from one to the other at any time). It's actually a relatively simple ten-step process to follow, especially if you've had much experience with installing PHP from scratch. When complete, you can start up one or the other, making it easy to test scripts in both or to just use the functionality in one (as he needed with PDO).

Davey Shafik has already gotten some of his experiences down in blog post form from the php|tek conference today, actually starting with the day previous in his Day 0 and Day 1 posts.

In the Day 0 post he just mentions arriving at the conference and getting things ready, but Day 1 sees him giving his "Future Deployment of PHP Applications" talk and his upcoming "Migration to PHP 5.1".

He also mentions videoing the presentation from today ("Deployment" talk) and is hoping to get a Flash video of the presentation up for all to see post-conference (a great idea for non-attendees).

Congratulations are in order to Jim Plush for him and his MyBic PHP/Ajax framework. They made it up to the top one percent of SourceForge projects in the span of four days.

I'm happy to say the My-Bic AJAX/PHP framework has been well accepted by the SourceForge community. Of 117,000+ projects on SourceForge MyBic has jumped to #1000 in just 4 days and is climbing each day. The new features of My-Bic have made it a top contender for ajax enabled php applications. Development continues on the project to further support the needs of the casual developer's home page as well as the enterprise needs of a full web-based desktop application.

He follows this with a listing of the latest features of the current version (0.6) of the framework, including an install of only three files, the EasyForms functionality, built-in network issue handling, and a simple two lines of Javascript to use the library.

From the Zend Developer Zone today, there's the continuation of their "Blueprint for PHP Applications" series, this time focusing on bootstrapping (part 1).

The definition (of bootstrapping) from Wikipedia has more flair to it than I can probably give this article, but nonetheless bootstrapping is an incredibly important part of a PHP web application. It is the ignition, the launch-pad, the booster rockets, and even the safety gear for our trip through PHP Best Practices. Without a well designed bootstrap, our application will never get off the ground.

The general idea behind the bootstrapping is forcing all of the requests to a domain to be funneled through a central script and branching out from there. They talk about how to use Rewrite rules to accomplish this and how to set the setup. He finishes the post off by bringing it back to the layout of the application, pointing out where it fits in.

AJ Tarachanowicz has written in about the latest updates that have been made over at the Seagull project - a move up to the first Release Candidate for version 0.6 of the framework.

After a 2 week sprint to the finish line, I'm pleased to announce the first release candidate for the 0.6 series of Seagull framework project is now available for download . There's been a lot of improvements implemented under the hood, but the most noticeable change is the completely redesigned admin user interface by Julien Casanova. Curious to try before you 'buy', checkout the demo at http://demo.seagullproject.org (config edits disabled). Although we have maintained our 1 release per month policy for most of the project's life, the last stable release was back in November 2005, and that was from the 0.4 series which started way back in the beginning of 2005.

Other improvements that he's notes you'll find in this release are:

• workflow and usability vastly improved with the sleek new admin GUI
• the Translation2 package is now fully integrated
• internationalised GUI strings
• navigation management vastly improved
• subtrees of navigation for each role of user in the system
• navigation types extended to include external links
• full URI aliasing support with javascript generation of search engine friendly URIs
• and much, much more...

If you haven't tried Seagull yet, now is a good time to check it out. The 0.6 series will be supported and improved throughout the coming months after which we're aiming for the 1.0 release. As the project's goals for feature completeness are now almost fully realised, there will be 1 final development cycle before we release 1.0 which we anticipate will happen in mid 2006. If you want to get in touch with the development team you can find us on #seagull, and for all bugs/feature requests please us.

Jim Plush wanted to try a little experiment with perfomance in PHP - specifically dealing with the placement of the class code in an application.

Out of sheer boredom I wanted to see which was better, including one big file of classes or splitting your classes up into multiple files. I'm going to use nusoap as an example. The NuSoap package lets you download one file. nusoap.php. That one file contains 9 classes. While not only is this method nice as you only need to include one class, its also 24% faster on average than having to include 9 seperate files.

In his informal testing he found that combining the files/classes into a single large file made for better performance (as far as object usage) - of course, that also makes it harder to maintain...

On his Gentoo blog, Stuart Herbert has posted this update about the dev-lang/php packages being stabillised for the distribution of the OS.

On Wednesday, Luca filed a request to stabilise our new dev-lang/php packages. As of this morning, these are now the standard packages on the PPC64 and x86 architectures.

We're stabilising PHP-4.3.11 (for the folks who haven't ported packages to work with PHP 4.4's reference changes), PHP 4.4.1, and PHP 5.0.5 (for the early adopters who have binary-encrypted packages). PHP 4.4.2 and PHP 5.1.2 will be stabilised sometime in March (is my best guess).

He also lists some of the advantages that these new packages will bring to Gentoo, like: PHP5 support, a "one package install", the ability to run PHP4 and PHP5 concurrently, and the ability to install PECL packages easily.

Via this new post on Nexen.net today, there's a pointer to a two-part article from Clickablebliss.com comparing PHP and Ruby on Rails.

Over the last few weeks, I've been asked by both friends and clients, "So what is that thing called Rails I keep hearing about (and/or keep hearing you talk about)? How is it different from PHP?" Typically I give them a three-part answer that'll I'll now iterate for the blog. While this is far from a complete comparison, hopefully it will be useful to some people out there.

In Part One, they look at the major difference between the two - one being and language, the other a framework. They also mention how something simple, like templating, is handled on either side.

Part Two focuses more on Ruby, the language, itself - what it is, its use of objects, and a comparison of the same to what PHP has to offer.