Gyorgy Fekete has provided what he calls a complete guide to PHP development on Mac OS X in a recent blog entry.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

Software company BlueStatic will be releasing their native Mac debugger, MacGDBp tomorrow (June 18th) to the community.

Here's more information from their press release:

Blue Static today is announcing the release date of MacGDBp, a native Cocoa application that allows Web developers to debug their PHP applications. The tool makes use of the Xdebug (http://www.xdebug.org) PHP extension that provides remote debugging functionality. Blue Static will be releasing the software under the GNU GPL version 2 on the morning of Tuesday, 17 June 2008.

The interface for the application is modeled after the XCode product from Apple to help integrate it more fully into the OS look and feel. It will require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to run and screenshots of the tool can be found here and here.

Christopher Jones has posted about the latest Instant Client release for the Intel chips running OS X:

Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.

The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.

The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.

On the PHP-GTK Community site, there's a new tutorial showing how to install the PHP-GTK platform to a Mac OS X machine:

Installation of PHP-GTK 2 on MacOS X 10.4 and 10.5 is actually pretty simple, as it can use the latest PHP-GTK installer, which works just like any other Mac installer.

They include screenshots as a guide to the step-by-step (extremely simple) process of getting the software installed.

For those interested in technical details, a complete list of the prerequisites is given at step 2 of the installation. Download the installer at http://www.kix.in/php-gtk2/PHP-GTK-2.0.0.dmg

Havard Eide is asking for your help in a new entry to his blog. He's looking for ways to speed up his development in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging.

There is one thing I do need over everything else: remote debugging. Having used Zend Studio for 3 years now it hasn't been the best editor ( I'd rather prefer PHPEclipse/PDT ) but the remote debugging facility is superb [...] Eclipse it has all the tools you need to develop with but the debugging is slow, way too slow!

He's looking for anyone out there that might be able to help him speed up the debugging on his Leopard-installed version of Eclipse ("So slow actually that I had to install Zend Studio 5.5 for whenever I have to debug a file...")

Ben Ramsey has put together a dashboard widget to grab the latest from the Funcaday.com website (spotlights one PHP function each day).

While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend's Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer's new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can't quite figure out what to get.

TO help out the lazy out there, he's created this widget to grab the latest image from the funcaday website and pull it right into your Dashboard.

In a recent entry, Sean Coates shares some tips he found when working on a project (the redesign of the php|architect website) and trying to set up a development environment on his Mac in the latest version of Apple's operating system - Leopard.

There are a bunch of things wrong with Leopard, but over all I'm pretty happy with it. I did, however, have a bit of a hard time getting my development environment up and running (I did a clean install). I'll outline the steps that I took to get a functioning Apache, PHP, MySQL installed. Sure, you could use the leopard-bundled Apache and PHP, but if you're like me, you generally upgrade PHP (and use weird extensions) a lot more often than Apple will upgrade it.

He walks through the entire installation, complete with the commands that'll need to be made to both make the install and configure the Apache instance to work with PHP.

Christian Stocker points out a blog post from Tobias Ebnother showing how to set up a native apache instance on Leopard (OS X) with a 64 bit PHP included.

With massive! help from Marc Ammann I was able to build a PHP Binary that loads with the Leopard shipped Apache.

His method replaces the standard iconv file with a custom built one (based on this source) prior to compiling. Then, in his configure, he sets certain flags, specifically the "arch x86_64" one, to get it to recognize the new setup.

Felix Geisendorfer shows, in a new blog post today, how to setup XDebug (the popular debugging extension for PHP) on a Mac OSx (or Win32/Linux) system.

One of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source.

His is a four step process of installing XDebug support on his MAMP setup - including a few configuration directives you'll need to apply to get XDebug support included.

Stefan Mischook has taken a little time out from his beginner's guides to PHP to post today about the simplest way to set up PHP and MySQL on a Mac - MAMP.

In my beginners php videos, I recommended XAMPP as the way to easily install Apache, PHP, MySQL on a MAC. [...] This nifty little application allows you to (really easily) install Apache, PHP and MySQL. You are provided with a standard DMG file that you simply drag to your applications folder.

He includes screenshots, details on what the package contains, sample code using it and, of course, the Dashboard widget to start and stop the Apache and MySQL servers.