On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new article that looks to answer the question in its title - "Why should I care what server my application is running on?" (by Eddo Rotman)

Imagine this - you develop an application on your machine and then, when you come to deploy it to the production server, all of a sudden, you encounter various errors and failures. Or maybe, when you decide to switch your hosting provider, your application stops behaving the way it should. How about this -... one day, out of the blue (well, out of your IT manager's whim) your application just misbehaves. Sounds familiar?

Times like can never be completely avoided (yes, there'll always be bugs) but you can take some steps to help prevent most of the major failing points. He points out some of the key configuration directives to watch out for, differences in some functions' responses based on the OS, and the differences in character sets between a unix-based and Windows based environment (like rn versus just n).

Stefan Priebsch has posted an overview of some of his experiences with test-driven development in PHP. Specifically, he talks about it in the context of a small CMS he's been working up.

The CMS I am using is a small engine that puts together (potentially multi-lingual) page content, templates, and a site structure, and creates semi-static pages. It does not have a sleek GUI frontend, because by nature I am not afraid of a text editor, and most of the time get quicker results by just writing HTML than fighting with one of these what-you-see-is-what-you-might-get HTML editors.

He talks about the configuration files containing the app's settings (inspired by the YAML Symfony uses) and his work towards the "best matching pattern" algorithm. This is where the TDD came in - he cheated a little with some base classes (tests first!) and then came up with the tests for checking template names and more complex template interactions.

The post includes drops of code here and there as well - examples of the unit tests and of the configuration files.

This new post on the Symfony blog today looks at using the framework's built-in support for the YAML format. They include a few examples of the code to make the files and how to use them.

Here is a short tutorial about my discovery of the new YAML parsing library that comes with symfony 1.1. As you may know, YAML files are a place symfony developers spend time writing configuration, it is very important they have a good tool to manipulate data and debug files.

They include code showing how to pull in a sample file, access the properties inside of it and how to take a multi-dimensional PHP array and push it back out (automagically) into a new YAML formatted file.

On the Ibuildings blog, Ian Barber has a reminder to PHP developers out there used to their servers "just working" because of the popularity of LAMP. He recommends digging a little deeper to the "behind the scenes" of how the server is configured.

PHP programmers generally know what a good systems architecture should look like, but it is often a reality of development that they will have little input on the system itself until the last minute. In fact, it's far from uncommon for a developer to be faced with an off-the-shelf dedicated LAMP server, and left up to their own devices.

He recommends getting to know things like the package manager for your distribution (apt, yum, yast, etc), stripping down the modules your installation is using, check that all of the packages in use need to be enabled and ensure that the network connection is set up correctly and is what you need for the site.

In a new post to his blog today, Eirik Hoem gives an example of using the parse_ini_file function to work with .ini files as configuration for your application.

When doing complex applications it's often nice to have some sort of system for handling settings. PHP has a nice function called parse_ini_file which can be used to create a basic but still usable setting file feature. A simple class which loads the configuration file and offers some methods to retrieve the values for a given key is all that's needed.

His example code gives a sample ini file with database connection information and a MyConfigClass that parses the file and can get or set values in it.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new article/tutorial showing how to keep things in sync on your Drupal installation with the help of Adobe AIR.

Whether you're an enterprise developer working in a large shop or setting up a blog for yourself, you've almost certainly been tasked with keeping your development code in sync with some type of stable release. Whether a project is big or small, you still need to ensure that the core code you work with remains consistent.

The tutorial walks you through the setup of a basic AIR application, how to pull the configuration XML into it and parsing it to use in the interface. The next step is the sync, grabbing your config and pushing it out to other multiple configs across your sites (via a REST service).

PHPEveryDay.com has posted a few more tutorials today covering configuring Drupal for your site:

• Drupal Configuration: Site Maintenance
• Drupal Configuration: File System
• Drupal Configuration: Boosting performance by Caching
• Drupal Configuration: Setting Date and Time
• Drupal Configuration: Looking Error Report Log
• Drupal Configuration: Error Handling
• Drupal Configuration: General Setting
• Drupal Configuration: Login to Administration Page

Check out PHPEveryDay for more great PHP-related tutorials.

On the Developer Tutorials blog today, Akash Mehta has posted the second part of his look at the "ultimate web development environment", a continuation from this previous part.

Today I'm going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.

Tools mentioned this time include things like a local development server (invaluable) some PHP configuration tips and the editors they mentioned, things like Aptana, Eclipse and Zend Studio.

For anyone that's had an issue with getting XDebug to work with the Debian linux distribution, you might want to check out this helpful hint Carsten Lucke has posted about.

This week I started to setup a Debian-based (Etch) web-server with PHP 5.2 in a virtual-machine with VMWare. Part of this setup was getting XDebug2 integrated. It's really awesome and my students definitely need to learn about it. [...] Building went well as usual but when I tried to integrate the extension inside php.ini it was all weird.

His system kept throwing him an error when he tried to load the shared module using the zend_extension directive, hand things happened. Loading it normally worked (so he knew it wasn't the module) and he finally figured out the problem:

But I need to enable it as Zend extension. Whatever. I finally used the full path to xdebug.so to load it [...] that worked.

The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post mentioning the use of YAML structure for creating configuration files in your application.

YAML, or YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a "human friendly data serialization standard". It's essentially a very basic format for storing data, and uses far less syntax than standard PHP. [...] It's almost like English; it's as basic as you want. Of course, that's not to say it doesn't support complex structures - this example demonstrates the power of the format.

He also points out the spyc extension that makes working with the files in PHP a breeze.