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.

Till Klampaeckel has a recent post about PEAR versus PEAR Farm on his blog detailing what each is and how to use the PEAR Farm to get your software out there.

With the release of Pirum, I'm really excited to see two public PEAR channels that aim to make PEAR a standard to deploy and manage your applications and libraries. One is PEARhub and the other is PEAR Farm. I think I'm gonna stick with PEAR Farm for a while, so this blog entry focuses on things I noticed when I first played with it. [...] A lot of people mistake these new channels for the wrong thing. They think that this will eventually replace PEAR. I don't think it will - ever.

He shows how to get the PEAR Farm libraries installed (via the PEAR installer) and how to set up your project with the pearfarm command-line tool. He also offers a few "gotchas" and tips to help you with a few of the issues he saw along the way. You can get an idea of the end result by looking at Till's PEAR Farm page.

Rob Morgan has submtted a recent post from his blog that shows how to create and deploy a PEAR package for your application onto the new Pearhub repository.

You might be wondering what is Pearhub? From Pearhub.org - 'Pearhub is a pear channel and a pear package publishing platform. As a user, you can install packages. As a developer, you can publish packages'. You can read Troels Knak-Nielsen's introductory blog post here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/01/08/introducing-pearhub.

You'll need an OpenID, an account on github and know how to use git on your system to get everything packaged up and ready to go. You create your app locally, make a github repository for it and set up a pearhub account to point to it. With all of that set up, it's as easy as doing a channel-discover on the pearhub server and running the "pear install" on the package. The rest is done for you!

On HowToForge.com there's a new tutorial on how to get the combination of Lighttpd, PHP and MySQL up and running on an OpenSuse linux installation.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Most of the software installation is handled via packages installed by the "yast2" package manager but you'll still need to go in and modify some of the configuration files to get PHP and Lighttpd to play nicely together. Besides the MySQL package required for PHP's MySQL support, they also suggest getting a few other packages for things like SOAP, SQLite, IMAP, zlib and openssl.

Matthew Turland has put together a guide for getting PHPUnit and Xdebug up and working on one of the latest Ubuntu releases (Karmic) to resolve an upgrade issue with the package install.

This is just a quick post to advise anyone who may be using PHPUnit and Xdebug together on Ubuntu Karmic. If you try to upgrade to PHPUnit 3.4.6 and you're using the php5-xdebug Ubuntu package (which is Xdebug 2.0.4), you may get output that looks like [this error].

He gives a two ways to overcome the issue - forcing the PEAR installer to ignore dependencies or reinstalling with Xdebug 2.0.5 instead (via the PECL installer) as a shared module.

Padraic Brady has a quick post in response to some questions he saw about installing PHP on a Ubuntu system (9.10/Karmic Koala) via apt-get.

As there was some exclaimation marks on Twitter about this, here's a quick article on installing PHP 5.3.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 using aptitude or apt-get. I use aptitude primarily, but the installation uses normal .deb files. Since Ubuntu will not officially adopt PHP 5.3 until next April, the PHP 5.3 debs I use are pulled from the Dotdeb Debian "Lenny" repositories. These are perfectly compatible with Ubtuntu 9.10 and only require the manual installation of two extra dependencies which Ubuntu cannot resolve itself.

You'll need to add in some new sources to your list, but after that it's a pretty simple process to pull in the PHP 5.3 packages, add in a few extra libraries and then run the update for apt-get to install it all.

On WebReference.com there's a recent article looking at the PEAR internationalization (i18n) packages and how they can be used to internationalize your application.

For many of us, the realization of the extent of countries' interdependence was driven home by the recent global economic meltdown. So what does all this have to do with us Web developers? It's a resounding wake up call that we have to think of other nationalities when we develop our websites and applications. In most cases, developing a web app in English alienates much of the world's population and greatly reduces potential profits! With that in mind, this article is the kickoff for a series that discusses the ramifications of globalization on our websites and applications.

The look at some of the local identifiers (like LC_ALL, LC_TIME, LC_ADDRESS and LANG), how to access the values for them on the different OSes and how to use the I18N_Country and I18N_Language packages from the PEAR I18N package to handle some simple multi-language support.

Michael Girouard has posted a new guide today about getting PHP 5.2.9 up and running on a CentOS distribution:

CentOS in my opinion is the best way to go in terms of server distros. Some people, including myself, are frustrated at the fact that some software is slow to be updated out of a fresh install: specifically PHP. At the time of this writing, PHP 5.1.6 is the version shipped with CentOS 5.4. While I'm sure they have their reasons for this, I still am required to write somewhat modern apps - 5.1 just doesn't cut it anymore.

He suggests moving away from the compile from source option and "go with the flow" and work with the packages that've already been created. You have to get the testing repository set up first (creating a configuration file to add the name, baseurl and other keys) to be able to use the yum installer tool to grab the latest packages.

An advisory has been issued on the PEAR blog about two packages - Net_Traceroute and Net_Ping - that could expose your site to a security issue, a remote arbitrary command injection.

Net_Ping is an OS independent wrapper class for executing ping calls from PHP. Net_Traceroute is an OS independent wrapper class for executing traceroute calls from PHP. When input from forms are used directly, the attacker could pass variables that would allow him to execute remote arbitrary command injections.

You can use filtering as a workaround until your packages are updated on your server. You can upgrade to the latest packages here: Net_Ping, Net_Traceroute.

On his codediesel.com blog today Sameer Borate has a quick post looking at URL manipulation with the help of the Net_URL2 PEAR package.

Whether you are dynamically creating urls or changing existing ones, manipulation of urls is a frequent coding requirement during development; doing the same on short urls is easy, but quickly becomes complex for urls which have larger query parameters.

He shows how to use the package to parse the current URL into its respective parts (host, port, path, etc) and how to automatically change certain parameters in the current URL and push the updated version back out the other side. There's also a bit there at the end on normalizing URLs.