Stefan Esser has released a patch, pulled originally from the Suhosin project's functionality, that allows you to use a bit of stealth for run the Zend Debugger and XDebug at the same time.

Those asking usually can understand why running two debuggers at the same time will lead to problems, but they don't understand why problems should arise when only one is used at a time. They want to be able to load Zend Debugger and Xdebug with the same php.ini without the need to restart the whole server just to change the debugger.

You can grab the patch from his site and install it like normal. With the patch, your PHP install will handle the rest behind the scenes.

On his blog today, Stoyan Stefanov has a howto posted on a trick he figured out to get a PHP script to grab data from multiple resources at one time - with cURL.

The basic idea of a Web 2.0-style "mashup" is that you consume data from several services, often from different providers and combine them in interesting ways. This means you often need to do more than one HTTP request to a service or services. [...] Using the curl_multi* family of cURL functions you can make those requests simultaneously. This way your app is as slow as the slowest request, as opposed to the sum of all requests. And that's something.

He includes example code that loops through a given array of resources and executes the fetch, brining the results back into a result array. To illustrate, he also includes two types of examples of fetching content - one for GET and another for POST.

On Nexen.net today, Damien Seguy presents some numbers on something that there's not a lot of research done on - the number of servers running multiple PHP versions.

This subject was hot at the birth of PHP 4 (running PHP 4 and PHP 3, or course), and it is coming back with a vengeance for PHP 5, backed by the immense user base of PHP 4. If PHP 5 is the default installation in 2008, what will happen to all those users? [...] Based on this observation and my earlier experience of cohabitation, I wondered if there was any indicator of multiple PHP installation.

He used the same tracker he implements for his normal monthly stats and ran a modified query to get the numbers of multiple-version servers that are out there. He's graphed some of the results. Based on his results, though, he notes a market for multiple PHP installations but "a pretty small one", noting that you're probably better off making the jump out to PHP5 anyway.

Stuart Hebert of the Gentoo blog has posted this new item as a reminder to all of those naysayers out there that didn't think it could be done that PHP4 and PHP5 can live together happily on the same box.

As an illustration of its possiblity, he points to this article from Andreas Korthaus showing how it's done under various different types of installs (Apache/CGI, Aapche/suphp).