cat/dev/DiBona/brain: LAMP to WAMP to XAMP to SOFT
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New users are making their way to Linux and open source, one acronym at a time.
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Stefan Mischook has taken a little time out from his beginner's guides to PHP to post today about the simplest way to set up PHP and MySQL on a Mac - MAMP.   In my beginners php videos, I recommended XAMPP as the way to easily install Apache, PHP, MySQL on a MAC. [...] This nifty little application allows you to (really easily) install Apache, PHP and MySQL. You are provided with a standard DMG file that you simply drag to your applications folder.   He includes screenshots, details on what the package contains, sample code using it and, of course, the Dashboard widget to start and stop the Apache and MySQL servers.
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PHP Magazine has a new posting today titled "How To: Install PHP 5, Apache 2 and SQLite on Windows". Obviously, it instructs you on the correct way to install these pieces of software correctly as well as how to interconnect them.
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In this final section I'll present some MIDI-specific troubleshooting tips, along with a brief description of the setup here at StudioDave, a few closing remarks, and of course some links to the Linux music-maker du jour.  read more
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On the SitePoint PHP Blog, there's a new post from Harry Fuecks pointing out an extension for PHP that allows it to use the Cairo graphics library.   Cairo is the "next generation" vector graphics library for Linux and very cool to have it available in PHP. Also cool about the extension was created using PEAR::CodeGen_PECL, which Hartmut describes here: look Mum - no C! (well almost).   Harry also asks if, with the rise of new technologies like this, if it's time to make the move to deprecate GD from normal PHP use - at the same time, removing another hurdle in PHP's path towards being thread safe.
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Development of native Linux audio plugins and softsynths may not be so relentlessly rapid as it is in the Windows and Mac sound software worlds, but new things do appear. This week I profile a cool new (well, relatively new) Linux softsynth, William Weston's Phase Harmonic Advanced Synthesis EXperiment, also known as Phasex.
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Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.   Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.   He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has posted an example of one way to use the XDebug software - to debug the symfony framework or any other script (with the help of vim).   Xdebug is one of the best debugger and profiler for php (maybe the only good one in open source :). The only problem is its lack of dedicated client. The only problem is its lack of dedicated client, however there is many plugins for many IDE or editors like Eclipse PDT or weaverslave and even for my favourite editor, Vim.   He quickyl runs through the installation of XDebug in your installation and the script needed to set up the debugging in vim. All that's left is to add the "XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1" flag to the end of your script name and letting the information flow in.
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Felix Geisendorfer shows, in a new blog post today, how to setup XDebug (the popular debugging extension for PHP) on a Mac OSx (or Win32/Linux) system.   One of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source.   His is a four step process of installing XDebug support on his MAMP setup - including a few configuration directives you'll need to apply to get XDebug support included.
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In a new blog entry, Michael Kimsal points out a driver that Microsoft has released (during the end of last year) that allows PHP5 applications to connect directly to a SQL Server database.   This isn't replacing freetds any time soon.  I guess I'm still wondering what the market for "PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server" really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I've seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.    He also points out a video that was shot of the development team talking about the driver (here's their blog too).
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Stefan Mischook has posted another video tutorial to help developers get started in their PHP travels. This time it covers how to turn on errors when using the popular WAMP installation package.   Within a WAMP installation, I ran into a little issue today when trying to change php.ini's 'display_errors' property. By default WAMP installs with 'display_errors' to 'Off' - This is a pain-in-the-ass setting when trying to write new PHP code because errors don't get displayed in the browser window   He includes the solution in the post but links as well to the video tutorial to show you exactly how it's done.
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Hartmut Holzgraefe shares an interesting extension with the community in this new blog post - one for outputting to a Braille device.   And yet another library wrapper extension, this time for libbraille, a library providing a unified API for Braille output devices.   You can get the full details on the extension from its homepage and it can be installed via the pear system.
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.
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As Mike Potter mentions in his new blog entry, Flash, Flex and PHP just got a great leg up when it comes to using the combination:   Patrick Mineault, who runs the AMFPHP project, has released a new version of AMFPHP 1.9, beta 2 now. However, the real big news in his blog post was the news that there is now a C based AMF extension for PHP.   According to the test data Patrick gives, the speed jump is well worth implementing the different functionality - a 100% boost, in fact, than the standard PHP version of AMFPHP. Check out Patrick's blog for the rest of these amazing stats.
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David has posted an article to the Expirmentalworks.net blog about a task that he and Johannes Schluter have finished up - importing the PHP CVS tree over into Git.   A few month ago Johannes Schluter and I started discussing about GIT and other decentralized version control systems. During our exploration of GIT we thought about importing the PHP CVS tree into git. A few weeks later and a lot of wasted cpu time, we finally managed to provide an inofficial GIT mirror of the PHP CVS repository. ItÃ¢ÂÂs provided by Johannes Schluter and mirrored by me.    The post documents the path they followed - using git-cvsimport, parsecvs and a path they needed to make - to finally get the import working without any flaws. You can check out their unofficial repository here (it's updates twice a day from the live CVS).
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InfoWorld - You've heard of LAMP, the popular open-source infrastructure stack featuring the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, MySQL's database, and the Perl, Python and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) scripting languages.
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Acronym mayhem Sun Microsystems has come up with its own version of the certified LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software stack. It won't take you too long to spot the difference.â¦