The latest post on Chris Jones's blog walks you through the process, step-by-step, of how to build PHP 5.3 with support for the Oracle HTTP server included with the 11g version of the database.

I get the impression that not a lot of people in the PHP community are using Itanium. There are enough warnings during PHP compilation that would make me extremely uncomfortable using it for production applications. A PHP on Itanium installation bug that I logged long ago has not been patched, indicating to me that not many PHP people are investing time in the platform. I can't recommend using Itanium platform for PHP. Anyway, I had a need and here are the steps for posterity.

It's a pretty simple process (if you're used to compiling your own software):

• Checks the OS and compiler to ensure needed tools are installed
• Set up the Oracle environment variables
• Set up the PHP environment
• Copy over the needed header files
• Extract PHP and modify its configure slightly
• make distclean and then configure