In a new post to his blog David Parra talks about compiling extension on Windows (specifically his ktaglib one).

This is actually the reason to not even try to compile my ktaglib extensions under Windows. Well but this approach is doomed to fail as most of the developers out there use Windows as their operating system. [...] So actually I ended up booting up windows again (well after searching for the harddisk that contains a running windows) and try to compile it. Otherwise my fellow collegues wouldn't be able to fix my buggy PHP code.

He talks about the pecl2 updates and how it makes compiling on a Windows system easier than before and two resources that budding Windows extension developers can use to get started - the PHP.net wiki and a screencast from Elizabeth Smith that can help out quite a bit.

Christopher Jones mentions the release of the latest OCI8 component for PHP - version 1.3.4 stable.

OCI 1.3.4, with the changes I mentioned in my last post, is now available on PECL: http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.

He also mentions the work on the Windows version of the extension that he's been up to with the plan to make two OCI8 DLL releases for the future - one using 10g libraries and the other using 11g.

This recent post on the PHP::Impact blog spotlights a useful little tool for those developers needing to span the gap between PHP and Java in their applications - the PHP/Java Bridge.

The PHP/Java bridge allows you to quickly access Java classes from within your PHP classes without having to know Java and vice versa. Because of this two-way flexibility, you can access hundreds of pre-built Java classes from PHP, and hundreds of pre-built PHP classes from Java opening up your applications to greater flexibility and enhanced functionality.

The post includes an introduction to the bridge's functionality - its functions/methods, how to make a new instance of it, catching exceptions and the type conversion it automatically does (like lang.java.String directly to the PHP String type).

They also mention the Zend Platform bridge functionality for a more commercial solution.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook shares his reasoning for making all of your pages PHP pages, regardless of static content or dynamic.

By making all your web pages PHP pages from the start, you are basically leaving open the possibility of using PHP in your web pages at any time.

By his reasoning, it provides an "out" for you later on should you decide that a page needs to have some dynamic content thrown in there somewhere (without having to change the filename - bad for SEO, supposedly).

PHPBuilder.com.au continues their look at using phpMyAdmin in this new part of the series today. This new article focuses on using the interface to make queries against the data in your tables.

The previous article gave you an overview of the phpMyAdmin interface and functionality. It's now time to dive in further and learn how to construct and execute queries.

They show (complete with screenshots) how to use the GUI to build the different parts of your query - a simple SELECT statement with a join pulling together the customer information and their addresses.

Raphael Stolt, with some time on his hands, set up a local copy of Xinc, the "shiny new Continuous Integration(CI) server" as hosted on the Google code site and spent some time working with it:

Since then the idea of building a Growl publisher plugin for Xinc was traveling my mind repeatedly, so the following post will break this circle and show a possible approach to build such a plugin, which can be used to notify the build result for continuously integrated projects and thereby provide an on-point/immediate feedback.

He includes the plugin class (ready for cut&paste) as well as the task definition and how to hook it all in to the Xinc build system. There's also a little example of it in action - a happy/sad indicator showing if the build failed or was a success, right there on the desktop.

A while back Mathew Turland posted a guide for getting a custom version of PHP compiled on a Windows machine.

At the encouragement of Elizabeth Smith, I went through the process (not-so-recently as of this blog entry) of compiling PHP on Windows.

He gives his "laundry list" of things to download/have access to and the link to Elizabeth's tutorial handy. Matthew found a few differences in his compile - an issue with IPv6 support and a pathing problem with the scripts trying to find libmysql.dll. He also throws in his instructions on getting aspell support compiled in.

DevShed has started up a new tutorial series today with part one of their overview of the DOM extension that's included with PHP5:

Simply put, the DOM XML extension, as its name suggests, will permit you to work on XML documents by way of the DOM API. [...] In this article series I'll be discussing some of its most relevant methods and properties and accompanying all of these explanations with concise and instructive hands-on examples.

They look at using the DOM to create new documents, modify documents by adding additional nodes and converting over a SimpleXML document to be manipulated.

Antony Dovgal has pointed out that the latest builds of the PHP documentation using the new PhD system have been put online.

Feel the difference:
With the old OpenJade/DocBook it took 40-60 minutes to build 'many htmls' version of the manual.
With PhD it takes less than 2 minutes to build all three formats ('phpweb', 'one big html' and 'many htmls').

You can grab the latest version of PhD to work on your very own docs either from their CVS repository or download them from the Docs section on the main PHP.net website.

DevShed gets another new series kicked off in this new article - an introduction to creating PDF documents with PHP5:

In this series of articles I'll show you how to start using the "PDFlib" package to build basic PDF documents. In upcoming articles I'll cover other important characteristics, like including images into a PDF file, displaying blocks of text, and drawing basic shapes.

You'll need to be familiar with object oriented programming to understand most of this tutorial, but that's only really to get a handle on using the PDFlib library. They create some sample PDF files with it - one containing a simple string on an A4 page and another on a larger A5 page format.