Now, at a programming level, a new initiative which could finally reconcile the great divide between PHP and .NET programming languages for the good of everyone - courtesy of WCM vendor Jadu. Development of the Phalanger PHP compiler was funded by the firm, but it is now releasing it into the open source community. It basically enables the creation of PHP applications which can run natively under the .NET Framework, allowing firms to make use of PHP apps without needing to rip out existing .NET/Visual Studio environments.

Phil Muncaster (author of the post) suggests that this technology is another reason to remove the "walled gardens" some .NET developers have put up and left in the flexibility and power that PHP has to offer their online development world (and vice versa).

How to get a back trace on windows without having to compile PHP has been an impossible task for many of us. The difficulty was to first succeed to compile php (given that you have a visual C++ installed). If you are in the middle of a bug hunting session, no need to say that setting up a windows build system is the last thing you like, especially if it is your first time. Thanks to Edin's window binary and MS Diagnostic Debug , it is now possible to have a backtrace in a couple of clicks.

To use the method you will need a few pieces of software to help out but all are available for free. Next up are the steps to get things set up (simple) and the creation of the backtrace to catch the error, complete with screenshots for the whole way. The end result is a nice, pretty error message output to the browser (Internet Explorer) that also dumps the backtrace for you to use.

Finally an open source PHP compiler ! Roadsend was perviously available as a commerical compiler for PHP with prices starting from $129. They seem to have shifted to the OSS model recently, giving free professional licence to their older compiler while they're working on releasing the precompiled versions of their open source code base.

He also links to a community site that offers the latest news about the project, some good places to start if you're just picking it up, and the timeline/roadmap for how things will progress.

Here is an recent e-mail exchange that puts it in its place (along with some information about code browsers and documentors and a lot of confusion on my part). I don't think anyone is going to mind me posting these since the only one who comes off as an idiot is me.

In the course of this exchange involves mentions of different efforts through out time to compile PHP code, including a proof of concept put together by Marco Tabini. He also includes the responses for each of the other people he CCed on the email (like Marco and Jeff Griffiths - Active State and Haiping Zhao - Facebook).

I came across this great open source project that allows you to convert your php scripts to a fast/cgi executable that can be executed by any web server that supports it (including apache and IIS).

Roadsend is a native compiler for PHP that converts scripts into free-standing binaries and can be used for building both online and offline applications.

Now I have gotten the new soon to be released Intel C++ compiler version 10 from the guys at Intel and things are working much better now. I used the same machine and same setup as in my last post just with the new Intel compiler installed.

The installation itself is quite simple just click through the wizard and when you are done you need to export some environment variables and set the CC compiler variable [...] then you compile Apache, PHP and APC as normal

He includes some stats as well, showing about a 2 request per second jump with the new compile (21% difference for template processing too).

Well the first build proved to be somewhat less that a full success. It worked only on one computer: the one that was build on. Since this limits PHP use on the Windows platform I went ahead and read about Microsoft manifest files, SxS (side by side) assemblies and other wonderful stuff that Microsoft has provided for us in version 2005 of their development package.

The new build should be installable without any libraries from Microsoft and you can grab both of them directly from his site:

• php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip
• pecl-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip

I know very little of compiler and interpreter theory and have never (yet) created a working implementation of a compiler or interpreter. What you're about to read or (most likely) skip over is a Head-in-Ass post and feel free to flame me on parts where I'm wrong, which will be most places. Do realize that this is one end user's opinion of the matter and any perceived insult upon any author(s) is not intended and please do not take it as such.

Jacob talks about run-time classes, class optimization, what he "really wants" out of a compiler, namespace functionality, a "phpc" extension, and his opinions on the Zend Engine, other web technologies, and the future of PHP.

Before I choose yaxx and XML tools for code source transformation, I looked very attentively the phpCompiler project.

The main goal of phpCompiler is to translate PHP code directly into Linux assembly code (and they are apparently very close to it).

He mentions, though, that phpCompiler just doesn't fit what he's trying to do. He needs things like portability between platforms and a simple way to extend the PHP lexer and grammer for phpAspect. Unfortunately, phpCompiler either doesn't allow these or just makes them too difficult. He makes his choice for his situation - Yaxx

You can find out more about this free tool from their website or just download a copy and start checking it out.