Having just received his brand new Neo Freerunner device (a linux-based phone) Derick Rethans did what any other good PHP developer out there would do - he installed PHP on it right away.

As I mentioned, the Freerunner is basically a Linux computer - which means total freedom of what you install on it. Traditionally it comes with perl and python, including GTK bindings. However, no PHP is found on it. I set out to change that. Unfortunately there were some issues with cross compiling, so I decided to compile PHP on the phone. There were some issues with this.

Because the included BusyBox toolset (that emulates much of the traditional Unix tools) didn't have all he needed to compile directly, he compiled the "coreutils" libraries and installed them to the phone. After a few manual tweaks and file copies he had what he needed and ran the compile without issues. He even created a package you can download (a countdown timer) to see if your install is working correctly.

John Mertic passed along a note about a new post to the SugarCRM developers blog detailing how to enable IMAP support for PHP on an OS X machine.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last fall, Apple (finally) included a modern version of PHP (currently version 5.2.6 as of this writing). [...] However, the default install of PHP that Apple included didn't include all of the available PHP extensions. Most notable is the IMAP extension, which is used in SugarCRM for the Campaigns and Emails modules. However you can build this extension and have it loaded dynamically, without affecting the rest of the default PHP install.

He shows where to get the packages and libraries you'll need to get the support working. The method involves building a shared module and including it to be loaded in your php.ini. This way it doesn't disrupt anything the current build has and you don't have to recompile everything over again.

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).

On his blog recently Felix De Vliegher has posted about work he's done to gather some stats and great some data about how his PHP scripts are working based on a little statistical analysis.

Lately I've been interested in applying static analysis to PHP projects. Static analysis is the process of analysing software code - in our case PHP source code -, without actually executing the (compiled) result of the source code you're analysing.

He mentions some types of analysis and some of the tools that can be used to measure it. He also talks about issues it can help with (like the potential for harm if a part of code is changed) and a pointer to the Pixy software he used to generate the statistics (and images like this).

In a recent post to his blog Tony Bibbs shares his experience with getting the most recent release (PHP 5.3 alpha) of PHP up and working on his MacBook.

If there is anything you should gleam from this article for future reference, Leopard comes with a 64bit Apache installation.

He points out this fact because, if you go and build it as per the normal install instructions, it will toss a "wrong architecture" error. He points out a blog post from Marc Liyanage that helped him understand a bit better. His fix was to run Apache as 32 bit instead of trying to get PHP to compile up to its 64 bit standards. He even includes the two commands you'll need to change Apache over to run this way.

This post on the PHPImpact blog talks about a compiler that helps to bridge some of the gap between PHP and .NET - Phlanger.

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. [...] Phalanger compiles PHP scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) which can be executed by .NET or Mono runtime.

He mentions some of the features of the tool (including interoperability between .NET and PHP and the ability to use current PHP libraries inside the .NET application). More information can be found on the Phlanger website.

Elizabeth Smith has set out on something she calls the Great Compile Project - her effort to get all dependencies for PHP and PECL compiled on (at the least) Visual Studio 2005 transparently and provided openly.

Anyone crazy enough to help out is more than welcome. I'm currently working on the GTK dependency stack, which will hit quite a few PHP dependencies and PECL extension dependencies in the process. And yes I'd love to submit my hacks/fixes upstream, if someone could find me some information (where do you send libiconv patches?)

Her post mentions some of the things she's already been working on to help further the cause - compiling various Open Source libraries, figuring out issues surrounding MiniGW and some examples of more complex dependency issues she's come across.

Hasin Hayder has provided some instructions he's created to install the Imagick extension for PHP on a Ubuntu linux system (7.10) in a new blog entry.

I already have ImageMagick installed in my machine and I tried to install the Imagick extension for PHP but I was stuck with strange errors. I have spent couple of hours today to figure out what I did wrong and Why I cant build that extension. Finally I've figured out that I must install ImageMagick from source first to build that extension. Heres how to.

He walks through the install, talking about where to get the package from, where to get the PECL extension for PHP and the compile process (with the result of a .so file PHP's extension can use).

Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.

As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.

He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.

He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.

John Coggeshall has blogged about a method he's worked up for compiling extensions into the Zend Core software.

While Core does ship with a large list of extensions (which are all QA'd and supported by Zend) there are times when you would like to include non-official extensions from PECL for various reasons.

He breaks it down into a few simple steps - download, "phpize" the extension, compile it and add the extension to the php.ini. He details the second step of the process (the phpize) because of some of the differences there are between doing it for a normal PHP install and a Zend Core install.

He also provides directions for an exception to the rule - compiling a PDO driver for your ZC install. You'll have to trick the Zend Core installation into using the right files, though. Full instructions are included.