In a new post to his site Christian Weiske shares his interaction with the Open Source group at Apple concerning his Structures_Graph PEAR package. While they were interested in the package and its functionality but with one issue.

Fact is that Structures_Graph is used in the PEAR installer, which is shipped as part of OSX's PHP packages. Apple simply wanted to continue their current setup without changing anything

Unfortunately, Apple had issues with the package being under the LGPLv3 license. They had a concern that, in certain circumstances, the license could allow the owner access to other potentially sensitive information from the user. He lists out his options - bascially either changing the license, asking Apple for compensation or just tell them "no". Unfortunately, if they decide that having it under that license isn't acecptable, they may drop PEAR all together (as the package is a part of the installer itself).

In his latest blog post Raphael Stolt has a new guide to getting the Redis extension installed on your Mac OS X PHP setup. Redis is a key-value based storage tool.

Two out of [the list of libraries] caught my particular attention: Rediska due to it's impressive Zend Framework integration and phpredis as it's a native PHP extension written in C and therefore supposed to be blazingly faster than vanilla PHP client libraries. The following blog post will show how to install and configure the aforementioned, native PHP extension on a Mac OS X system.

You'll need to have the redis server already installed (via MacPorts or some other method) but with that and the necessary libraries in place installing the extension is a simple "git clone" away. He even includes the location of a gist (code snippet) to help you test it out.

Rob Allen has a new post with some tips for those using the Zend Server Community Edition on OS X. While the Server installs a lot of the necessary software, there's still a few changes in the configuration and extra software he wanted - PHPUnit and Xdebug.

I've installed Zend Server CE on my Mac to see where it's got to and it's looking quite usable. The installation puts everything into the usr/local/zend directory which is fairly well laid out so that you can find what you are looking for. There's also a a nice admin system at http://localhost:10081 which allows you to restart PHP, view phpinfo(), configure extensions and php.ini. There's also a phpMyAdmin to help administer the bundled MySQL server. For Mac, this is now one of the better one stop shops for easy PHP & MySQL installation.

He shows how to set up pathing to include the Zend Server binary directories in your shell's paths, how to change the port over to 80 from the default 10088 and how to install PHPUnit and Xdebug.

On the Hauser & Wenz blog today, Christian Wenz points out a patched version of the interactive command line PHP client, phpa to work on a Mac OS X machine - phpa-norl.

phpa is an interactive command line shell for PHP by David Phillips. Stefan Fischerlander, usually known as a SEO expert and Perl admirer, has patched phpa for Mac OS X and Windows (the default builds theredo not seem to support a feature required by phpa). The result: phpa-norl. Stefan successfully ran this on OS X, and I could confirm that it runs on Windows, as well

He also mentions some features of the client including a history feature that makes looking back through previous commands simple.

On the Hauser & Wenz blog today, Christian Wenz points out a patched version of the interactive command line PHP client, phpa to work on a Mac OS X machine - phpa-norl.

phpa is an interactive command line shell for PHP by David Phillips. Stefan Fischerlander, usually known as a SEO expert and Perl admirer, has patched phpa for Mac OS X and Windows (the default builds theredo not seem to support a feature required by phpa). The result: phpa-norl. Stefan successfully ran this on OS X, and I could confirm that it runs on Windows, as well

He also mentions some features of the client including a history feature that makes looking back through previous commands simple.

Picking back up on his blog, Sean Coates shares a Dashboard widget he's created to do quick and dirty PHP interpreting on the fly:

I found myself using php -r on the command line to test some simple code snippets, and it occurred to me that this isn't "The Mac Way." So, following the excellent documentation at Apple, I managed to come up with something pretty useful in an afternoon.

His widget sits happily, ready to take in PHP code and output the result at the click of a button.

Picking back up on his blog, Sean Coates shares a Dashboard widget he's created to do quick and dirty PHP interpreting on the fly:

I found myself using php -r on the command line to test some simple code snippets, and it occurred to me that this isn't "The Mac Way." So, following the excellent documentation at Apple, I managed to come up with something pretty useful in an afternoon.

His widget sits happily, ready to take in PHP code and output the result at the click of a button.

Mac OS X PHP developers, listen up - Greg Beaver has a word of advice for you about your default PEAR installation:

I won't get into the questionable business practice of shipping software with known security holes that have had known fixes for years. Instead, I would like to offer simple step-by-step instructions of how to upgrade from outdated buggy PEAR versions to the latest stable release, 1.5.0.

You're five simple steps away from having an upgraded installation, all using the built-in pear installer and go-pear functionality.

Mac OS X PHP developers, listen up - Greg Beaver has a word of advice for you about your default PEAR installation:

I won't get into the questionable business practice of shipping software with known security holes that have had known fixes for years. Instead, I would like to offer simple step-by-step instructions of how to upgrade from outdated buggy PEAR versions to the latest stable release, 1.5.0.

You're five simple steps away from having an upgraded installation, all using the built-in pear installer and go-pear functionality.