In this post, I'll cover how to run XDebug (including the profiler) in Windows Azure Web Sites. Enabling XDebug in Windows Azure Web Sites is as simple as enabling an extension. However, enabling an extension for the built-in PHP runtime is slightly different than doing so for a custom PHP runtime. I'll cover both scenarios here.

The post is broken up into two sections - one if you're just using the built-in PHP runtime that's already in the instance and another if you're using a custom one of your own. Changes to the configuration files and some screenshots of where to make the updates are included.

I was writing about PHP.next before, many things improved there meanwhile. Most notably we have a committed version number: The next PHP release will be called PHP 5.4. The topic I want to talk about today is "Improved application portability" which covers multiple small changes which aim at making it simpler for developers to write applications working on any PHP setup.

The first two will be immediately familiar to any PHP developer, but the third might be a little more elusive. This option was used to compile in multi-byte encodings to use for data in an application. Unfortunately a good implementation (that didn't use mbstring) couldn't be found, so they're removing the feature.

I am currently working on a rather large project which is based on CakePHP framework. In order to simplify the task, I've broken down the whole application into a number of CakePHP plugins. Now, however, I want to enable/disable plugins on the fly. After a brief search around I couldn't find how to do that. Asking a question at #cakephp IRC channel did it. RabidFire instantly replied with the link that gave me an idea. 30 seconds later I had a working solution.

Since the plugins extend the main AppController, all it took was a beforeFilter() method call that looks at a request parameter for the plugin name, checks against an "allowed" array and throws an exception of it's not found or can't load it.

I hit a pretty good tutorial to enable PHP on Mac at About.com written by Angela Bradley that gets to the point: How to Install PHP on a Mac. Along the way I had to solve only one minor thing described in the caveat section at the end of this post. You see that the title of this post has the word installing (well I thought I had to install it '" that was my first reaction), but in fact it could be the word enabling because PHP is an integral part of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and we just need to enable it as you'll see soon.

He talks about enabling the web server, enabling PHP and testing the installation with a phpinfo. There's screenshots included so you can be sure you're in the right places.

I've just install the last version of PHP6 dev and I've decided to test the famous new feature, the PHP Unicode Support. I will not explain new things about PHP6 or Unicode or TextIterator, it's just my discoveries test on this features.

He steps through the process he followed - enabling Unicode support, testing various output methods (including just an echo and using the TextIterator) as well as some of the manipulation methods (next/first/current) that can be used to get certain characters out of a string.

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.

I find both sides of the argument quite compelling, and while FWIW I'm in favor of including them in the next release, I'm somewhat indifferent to the matter. According to one of the very latest messages in the thread, Zeev Suraski confirms they simplistic support will likely be enabled.

That's Jason Gilmore talking there, and he goes on to reinforce something Rasmus Lerdorf has said about namespaces in the past - they'll implement them when they find the right way (in the PHP spirit) to do it.