Anna Filina has posted a new item to her blog about some of her experiences with PHP 5.3 on the OS X platform including some of the different software she tried (like the Symfony framework).

I wanted to play with Symfony 2 and so needed to install PHP 5.3 on my OSX 10.5. What seemed like a simple task turned into a huge waste of my time. I use MAMP because it's a nice out-of-the-box solution. The problem is, it still doesn't ship with 5.3 because it's waiting for it to be "stable".

She tried to find a way to upgrade MAMP's installation to the latest stable version of PHP but was stopped by dependency errors and opted to go with XAMPP instead to get more of what she needed. She also has included a few edits to the post with more information - how to migrate your virtual hosts from MAMP to XAMPP and migrating over the MySQL structure.

In an interesting post to his blog Rob Morgan shows how you can log in to a terminal from a Zend Framework application (on OS X) with the help of NodeJS.

NodeJS is a tool designed to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. By using the I/O capabilities of NodeJS, I have built a simple TCP server that writes log messages to the OS X terminal (via STDOUT).

He shows how to take his example script and run NodeJS as a server on a local port (like 8003). You can then use his log writer plugin in your Zend Framework app to write directly to the waiting NodeJS server.

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.

If you've been puzzling on how to get a custom installation of PHP, MySQL and Apache set up on your Snow Leopard (OS X) upgrade, Rob Allen has just the post you've been looking for:

With OS X 10.6, Apple ships PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. Also, everything is now 64bit. This means that the entire effort required to get a working PHP dev environment for my work is now much easier.

He walks you through the modifications needed for files in /usr/local, changes to get MySQL started, updates to the Apache configuration to get it playing nicely with the PHP5 module and changes to the php.ini and Xdebug configurations to pick up the right extensions directory.

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.

Rob Peck has figured out a way to get memcache (pecl) to compile on his Mac (OS X).

So tonight I ran into an interesting issue this evening in configuring PECL memcache to run on my Macintosh. To give you a bit of background, I use the built-in copy of Apache, but with PHP (current 5.2.8) compiled from source since the version in Leopard is old and I needed some things that it didn't provide.

After finding out the problem (from a log file), he tracked down a similar issue and its solution. Trying it out, he found it worked - adding in an environment variable to tell the compiler with environment to use.

Rob Allen has made a new post to his blog today showing how he set up PHP (with MySQL, Apache and a few other extensions) on his OS X (Leopard) system.

In the vein of some of Lorna's articles, this is more a note for myself than anything else. Not everything is explained in detail as it assumes you know how to use a command line...These are the steps I take to get the Apple supplied PHP working with GD, PDO_MySQL and Xdebug working on OS X 10.5.

He show how to: run Apache in 32 bit mode, download and install MySQL, setup and configure Apache, changes values in the php.ini and install the other extensions (like XDebug and the GD library). He uses the latest PHP 5 distribution at the time - PHP 5.2.6 - but these instructions should work for any in the PHP 5.x series you might want to use.

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.

Zend has officially announced the opening of a public beta of a new product of theirs called Zend Server. Here's what the Zend Developer Zone has to say about it:

Zend Server is designed to be a all-in-one installer to get setup quickly with Apache, PHP, Zend Framework, and a PHP optimizer. It also comes with an admin UI to configure PHP easily. It uses native installers for various operating systems, and is available for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux (.deb, .rpm or tarball).

The Server comes in two flavors - the full edition and a lighter "CE" edition. The server comes with built-in features like page caching, system and website monitoring and support (with hot fixes). You can find out more about this new offering over on the Zend.com website.

Stoyan Stefanov has an interesting way to "automatically" create podcasts based on your blog posts using PHP, ffmpeg and the "say" command in OS X to create the mp3 result.

ffmpeg is such an amazing tool, looks like it's for video what ImageMagick is for images. An all-powerful all-formats wicked cool command-line tool. This blog post is an introduction to some of the MP3 capabilities of ffmpeg. I'll use ffmpeg to transform a blog post into a podcast-ready mp3 file.

The post shows how to use PHP's DOM functions to grab the title and contents of your post (a simple example, at least) and push that information out to a text file. From there, the "say" command is run on it with the "output" file parameter and the result is sent to ffmpeg for compression into an mp3.