In a new blog post Cal Evans shares a solution he's come up with to help simplify his PHP development - using the Sun VirtualBox software to create a self-contained, controlled environment to run his scripts.

The more I thought about it though, the more I realized there had to be a better way. My current setup doesn't allow me to do things like test PHP 5.3 without setting up a whole new server just for that purpose, or maintain an environment like my production server.

He was looking for something that would work on a laptop, allow for easy environment switching and let him work on multiple projects at once. He came across the VirtualBox software and adapted it to his own needs (including shares folders between instances and multiple instances running Ubuntu) on his local machine.

Mark Kimsal has posted part one of a new series he's working up on creating a virtual host control panel by pairing with PHP a few other technologies.

I still come across a person now and then who does not appreciate the power that any server control panel gives you. [...] They reduce the margin of error that a human can bring to the table when editing files and performing commands "by hand". If host control panels are so good, why would you want to write your own control panel when there are so many out there already? Well, the answer is, there aren't any open source ones.

He talks about starting out right by defining the build and the technology to use and only then gets started coding. His application uses the Cognify framework, SQLite, Nanoweb and, of course, PHP. At the end of this part of the series, you'll have the framework set up and a sample module in place to mess with.

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti shares some quick steps for setting up a virtual appliance on your system for "LAMP development made easy".

In this article I will show you why the LAMP platform has become the platform of choice for the development and deployment of high performance Web applications. To get a LAMP development environment fired up without the hassles of configuring everything from scratch you only need one thing, a Virtual Appliance.

He explains what the virtual appliance is and show the three step (really just two) process to getting things all set up and working with a complete Ubunutu, Taskel and Zend Framework installation layered on top of your OS now.

On the Stubbles blog, Frank Kleine has posted about the release of a new wrapper class he's developed to go around a virtual file system.

Some minutes ago I released the first version of vfsStream. vfsStream is a stream wrapper for a virtual file system that may be helpful in unit tests to mock the real file system. It can be used with any unit test framework, like PHPUnit or SimpleTest.

The idea for the class came about when he thought about the use of real databases vs test databases and applied it to file systems. You can grab the latest version from their trac website as well as get more information about known issues and a brief example of its use.

In response to this previous post from Jeff Moore, Tobias Schlitt shares some of his own comments on the subject - mainly that he wholeheartedly agrees.

The usage of interceptors (__get()/__set()/__isset()/__call()) makes your API a lot more readable and comfortable, while maintaining the purpose behind getters and setters: Checking the correctness of values assigned to a property and wrapping around retrieval mechanisms for a property. I personally call the way of maintaining value-correctness for properties through interceptors virtual properties, which fits quite nice I think.

Tobias gives an example of what he means by these "virtual properties" with an illustration from something widely used on the eZ Components libraries - comparing one method of setting text to an object to another (just setting versus the wrappers).

In this new post on the PHP Security Blog, Stefan Esser brings up an interesting issue when dealing with web applications - being able to bind a script/application to a different port on the local machine.

Unfortunately the ability to bind yourself to a port and receive connections is a threat to webapplications installed on different virtual hosts on the same IP, even if other security measures in place, like tight filesystem permissions or executing PHP script with the permission of the owner.

He gives an example in PHP of how this can happen and one of the scary side effects of having it in the same domain - the cookie information is passed in. It's a simple concept that could have very bad consequences in the wrong hands.

Additionally, you don't even have to create it in PHP either. As cyberlot mentions, it could be created in any language that has socket functions. Be sure to check out the comments for more thoughts and comments on the post.

Björn Schotte has posted this anticipatory post for the powerful Ajax + PHP tool coming from the TurboAjax.com group - a virtual data grid.

If you use Dojo, have a look at the fabulous widgets called TurboWidgets from TurboAjax.com: it's available for non-commercial and commercial usage. One of the great widgets is a data grid which can be customized in a wide variety.

As I've discovered in the TurboWidget forums, they're working on a virtual data grid. Imagine you want to display a list of 100,000 or more items which can be a major pita especially when working with slow internet connectivity. The solution is a real virtual data grid

He points to a demo they've posted and includes two screenshots, one of the previous situation with data grids like this, and a shot of theirs in action (loaded with 100,000 rows).