In this new entry to his Oracle blog Chris Jones explains some of the prompts you're given when you go to install the latest OCI8 drivers for PHP.

There's two versions - the short one that runs through a basic install, grabbing the package and change up your config and the other that talks about how to pull down and configure a certain version of the need comes up.

You can find out more about this updated package on its PECL page and the Changelog for anything more specific.

Stoyan Stefanov has posted about some updates he's been making to his Text_Highlighter PEAR package and to the hiliteme.com website.

In today's busy schedules there's less and less time to give love to our favorite open source projects. [...] Anyway, today I found the time to fix two bugs in Text_Highlighter and also include the patch from Daniel Fruzynski that adds support for highlighting VBScript. Wo-hoo!

The update to hiliteme.com uses the newly updated package, so you can try it out before you go and install it.

Stoyan Stefanov has posted about some updates he's been making to his Text_Highlighter PEAR package and to the hiliteme.com website.

In today's busy schedules there's less and less time to give love to our favorite open source projects. [...] Anyway, today I found the time to fix two bugs in Text_Highlighter and also include the patch from Daniel Fruzynski that adds support for highlighting VBScript. Wo-hoo!

The update to hiliteme.com uses the newly updated package, so you can try it out before you go and install it.

On his blog, Vinu Thomas has posted a guide to installing the Java bridge for PHP on an Ubuntu system:

If you're looking for the easiest way to install the PHP Java Bridge in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps...

The basic steps are quick and easy - be sure you have Java installed on your system (commands to install are included), download the Java bridge from Sourceforge and issue the commands (again, included) to install it into your apache2 package.

On his blog, Vinu Thomas has posted a guide to installing the Java bridge for PHP on an Ubuntu system:

If you're looking for the easiest way to install the PHP Java Bridge in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps...

The basic steps are quick and easy - be sure you have Java installed on your system (commands to install are included), download the Java bridge from Sourceforge and issue the commands (again, included) to install it into your apache2 package.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Vikram Vaswani has a tutorial posted introducing the PEAR HTML_QuickForm package and how to use validation right along with it.

Over the next few pages, I'll be introducing you to one of PEAR's most powerful tools for generating Web forms and validating the input that arrives through them: the HTML_QuickForm package. This package provides a flexible, reusable library of methods that can literally save you hours of time when dealing with form-based user input - and best of all, it's free and extremely easy to use. So what are you waiting for? Jump right in, and let's get going!

You'll need to be familiar with some of the technologies before getting started (it's not going to teach you PHP) and you'll need to have the software setup and ready with the HTML_QuickForm package installed. There's lots of different examples of form creation (including generated from database information) as well as information on the rules you can apply to your form elements to check on the user input (like alphanumeric, maximum length and matching a regular expression).

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Vikram Vaswani has a tutorial posted introducing the PEAR HTML_QuickForm package and how to use validation right along with it.

Over the next few pages, I'll be introducing you to one of PEAR's most powerful tools for generating Web forms and validating the input that arrives through them: the HTML_QuickForm package. This package provides a flexible, reusable library of methods that can literally save you hours of time when dealing with form-based user input - and best of all, it's free and extremely easy to use. So what are you waiting for? Jump right in, and let's get going!

You'll need to be familiar with some of the technologies before getting started (it's not going to teach you PHP) and you'll need to have the software setup and ready with the HTML_QuickForm package installed. There's lots of different examples of form creation (including generated from database information) as well as information on the rules you can apply to your form elements to check on the user input (like alphanumeric, maximum length and matching a regular expression).

In a new post Jonathan Street mentions a new PEAR package that's an API for the Compete API:

After writing about the compete API Hiroki Akimoto contacted me mentioning a proposal he had made to PEAR. Our scripts each had strengths and we decided to combine our attempts and hopefully make something better. After a week or so we updated the proposal with the new code and after a little time for comments and a week for voting the proposal was accepted and on 30th July a new package, Services_Compete, was available on PEAR

This package (currently in an alpha release, version 0.1.0) acts as a wrapper class to connect to and use the Compete SnapShot API.

In a new post Jonathan Street mentions a new PEAR package that's an API for the Compete API:

After writing about the compete API Hiroki Akimoto contacted me mentioning a proposal he had made to PEAR. Our scripts each had strengths and we decided to combine our attempts and hopefully make something better. After a week or so we updated the proposal with the new code and after a little time for comments and a week for voting the proposal was accepted and on 30th July a new package, Services_Compete, was available on PEAR

This package (currently in an alpha release, version 0.1.0) acts as a wrapper class to connect to and use the Compete SnapShot API.

On his blog today, Stoyan Stefanov shows how to use a PEAR package - PEAR::Services_Amazon - to "keep an eye on" Amazon's stats for a book.

I wanted to have a page that shows the books I've written, together with their Amazon sales rank and the average customer rating and number of reviews. It's really easy. I took one example out of the PEAR book and slightly modified it.

The script needs to few things to get up and running, so he points out those (an AWS id, the PEAR pacakge) and the simple path the application will take to grab the information (request/response). Then it's on to the actual PHP code - all 60 lines of it, including the HTML for the output.

It makes the request with the Services_Amazon package for the given item numbers (he happened to have already) and pulls the results back, looping through them displaying sales rank, title, author, the average rating, and the number of total customer reviews - all in a handy unordered list.