Recently on r/php there was a thread asking users about their development environments. The usual answers came tumbling out - mostly about IDEs and methods for uploading their code (side note: FTP is a horrible way to do this!). Out of 144 responses, I noticed that very few mentioned virtual machines. Most that said anything about operating systems or platforms made it clear they were developing on their local machine, with no separation between their everyday driver and their development environment. This has got to stop, especially amongst PHP developers where we have tools like XAMPP that require nothing more than a simple zip extract to get up and running with your own "server".

He walks you through the entire process, complete with screenshots and commands ready for copy & paste, to get your virtual machine server set up and working. The PHP install includes things like cURL, memcache, internationalization, GD and MySQL support. He also helps you get other tools like XDebug and PHPUnit installed.

This is definitely one of the more complete examples I've see of getting a VM set up and ready for development - if you've been wanting to try it out, I'd recommend this guide.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including the IIS7, SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer.

The platform installer also allows you to install popular PHP-based software quickly and easily on your Windows servers (like WordPress, Drupal and SugarCRM). The walk through helps you to install the software, shows you some of the options you can choose for installable software and what you can find in each of the tabbed sections.

CodeIgniter is a web application framework for PHP. It enables developers to build web applications faster, and it offers many helpful code libraries and helpers which speed up tedious tasks in PHP. CodeIgniter is based on a modular design; meaning that you can implement specific libraries at your discretion - which adds to the speed of the framework. This tutorial will attempt to show you the basics of setting up the framework, including how to build a basic hello world application that uses the MVC approach.

They start by looking at why you would even use a framework, what CodeIgniter is and what the MVC design pattern is (including its flow). The rest of the tutorial is broken out into the "Getting Started" guide:

• Downloading CodeIgniter
• Installing and Exploring CodeIgniter
• Configuring CodeIgniter
• Testing CodeIgniter
• Configuring CodeIgniter Cont.
• Create the Helloworld Database
• Create the Helloworld Model
• Create the Helloworld Controller
• Create the Helloworld View
• Ta-da and Some Extras

Earlier this month, I posted the release announcement for Zend Studio 5.5. Today, I got an email from my friend Avigail pointing me to a new web cast recorded by Yossi Leon the Product Manager, Zender, and all around nice guy has released a web cast walk through of some of the new features in this latest release.

The webcast shows off features like the Java code completion, Zend Framework code completion and integration functionality, and Zend Platform integration. If you've been looking around for a new IDE to work up code in, give the demo a look and see what you think.