On the O'Reilly ONLamp blog Todd Ogasawara points out a few things that Windows users should watch out for with the upcoming PHP 5.3 release.

PHP 5.3.0 is only in its first alpha release. But, if you run PHP in Microsoft Windows, you should talk a look at the release notes for Windows binaries.

Among the changes are things like the drop of support for Windows versions less than Win2000, the changeover for compiling needs (VC6 versus the newer VC9) and that 64-bit binaries will be provided as well as the normal 32-bit (on a trial basis).

Dhiraj Patra has posted a tutorial to his "LAM-PHP" blog today looking at a different-than-usual way for running PHP scripts - in the cron.

Lots of programmers like PHP for its ability to code and develop web applications fast. Code-debugging is a lot easier than with PERL or C. However, there is one thing a lot of developers are puzzled about, "How to run PHP Scripts with crontab?"

He explains how cron can be used effectively to replace including a backend script into another file (bad practice) and how to get started with PHP and cron. He includes how to find if you're using a CGI or Apache version of PHP and how to locate the binary. He takes this knowledge and shows how to apply it and put a sample script into the cron file. You can check out sites like this or this for more information on cron itself.

In this new tutorial on DevShed Alejandro Gervasio explains how to send emails from PHP with MIME payloads attached.

One of the most common tasks that a PHP programmer has to tackle is the development of applications that send MIME email in one form or another. In simple terms, MIME email consists of an extension of traditional email technology and comes in handy for sending email messages in fancy HTML and handling file attachments in a wide variety of formats.

In this first part of the series he just lays the groundwork - creating the mailer class they'll use for the series and using it to send a sample email (a basic message with a plain text MIME block).

Akash Mehta shares a helpful hint in this new post to the Developer Tutorials Blog today - testing out PHP code via the command line PHP binary.

Thankfully, PHP provides the interactive shell, allowing you to test out PHP interactively with immediate feedback. Here's how to take advantage of this mature feature of PHP.

With the help of the "-a" flag on the command line, the PHP binary will hand you an environment where you can code PHP and instantly see the results. He does mention a few quirks that make it different than working with PHP through a web server, namely moving in and out of code blocks and remembering to finish out with a semi-colon when the line is done.

Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

On the PHP Web Services blog today, Sami asks "what's missing from PHP's SOAP extension" that needs to be added or corrected.

PHP SOAP extension is good to get started, to play around with. However, it falls much short in meeting the enterprise demands in the SOA era.

He talks about things missing (like binary file features and lots of security features). He also notes something that most PHP developers love about the extension - the WSDL parsing that makes it so easy to simply call a remote service without having to go through the pain of hacking through it yourself.

DynamicWebPages.de points out that the Windows binary builds have been posted for the in-development version of PHP, version 5.3:

The sources for 5.3 are now on the snaps.php.net page as well as the Windows Binaries for testing the new PHP version. Besides the addition of name spaces, Late Static Binding and dynamic-static calls, this version also has mysqlnd a new native PHP driver for MySQL (as replacement to libmysql). This not only performs better than libmysql, but also is more resource-saving and can also be used more simply, since he does not have any external dependence.

You can download the snapshots and binaries from the snaps.php.net website.

WebReference.com has a new tutorial that looks at the difference sorts of operators that PHP has to offer - unary, binary and ternary - to help you with the logic in your applications.

An operator is a special character or combination of characters that operates on variables. There are 3 types of operators in PHP: unary, binary and ternary. They can be used to manipulate a variable with up to 3 arguments at a time. This article wasn't written to discuss the meaning and usage of each operator in PHP, but rather to explain the differences between these types of operators and to give examples about how each functions.

They look at the different types of operators (and include examples for each) - unary (like ! or ++), binary (things like + / == and &&) and a special case - ternary. This uses two characters in conjunction (the question mark and colon) to replace a simple sort of If statement.

Richard Davey, after spending many an hour working on a PDO SQLite bit of functionality for his latest application, has come to one conclusion - "the PDO SQLite blob support is totally borked".

I really don't know why, or what is going on, but after spending hours trying various code permutations I'm just not getting anywhere. I tried asking on php_general to no avail, so I consider this blog entry my last ditch attempt to get someone to shed some light on this issue before I give-in and ditch PDO for good.

His mission was to store an image in the database, but everything he tried just didn't seem to work out. After partial image storage and parameters being ignored, he's still at a loss as to how to get his (seemingly) simple quest solved. The only comment so far, though, hasn't seemed to help much - he's even opened a bug report upon Wez Furlong's request.