If you've ever attended a PHP conference, you might have thought that Apple was a sponsor based on all the Mac laptops you saw. Many of the PHP developers toting Macs are running Linux as a virtual machine but more and more PHP developers work natively on the Mac. Recognizing this fact, Oracle has made it downright easy to develop PHP/Oracle applications on the Mac. In this guide I'll show just how easy it is to get your Mac setup to build Oracle-based PHP applications.

His method requires that you have access to a server already running Oracle (even the Express Edition will do), XCode and either Fink or MacPorts (optional). His setup is to use the Oracle installation inside of a virtual machine to get the needed libraries from to build PHP correctly. He even includes some screenshots of the Parallels installation of Kubuntu and some test code to ensure things are working as they should.

Okay, there is some considerable hacking involved to get this working, and the solution is only a workaround until "sometime before the end of 2006", which was quoted to me by Zend as the time they expect to get the Zend debugger working for the mactel platform. No rush there guys.

His solution involved using Parallels Desktop, Zend Studio, a hack on the installer to get it working, ensuring it finds the right php.ini (a problem he had) and customizing the setup to work with the buttons of your choosing.