Jeff Rubinoff from Sun has passed along a link to a developer blog they're hosting covering the development of their NetBeans for PHP project's latest advancements.

We at Sun have been working on a PHP editor in NetBeans IDE. The first full-featured version will go out in our 6.5 release, scheduled for November, but it's available for use already in our daily builds. [...] We're not PHP developers, strictly speaking, we're developing a tool for PHP developers. However, we are trying to get as much feedback from PHP developers as possible.

The blog already has tons of content - tutorials, software updates, screencasts, personal experiences - all covering the development of the next version (beta download) of the PHP tools in NetBeans.

In a new post to his blog David Parra talks about compiling extension on Windows (specifically his ktaglib one).

This is actually the reason to not even try to compile my ktaglib extensions under Windows. Well but this approach is doomed to fail as most of the developers out there use Windows as their operating system. [...] So actually I ended up booting up windows again (well after searching for the harddisk that contains a running windows) and try to compile it. Otherwise my fellow collegues wouldn't be able to fix my buggy PHP code.

He talks about the pecl2 updates and how it makes compiling on a Windows system easier than before and two resources that budding Windows extension developers can use to get started - the PHP.net wiki and a screencast from Elizabeth Smith that can help out quite a bit.

John De Goes (of N-Brain) let us know about a screencast he's posted on Vimeo of how he's set up the UNA Editor (Personal Edition - now free!) to work with PHP.

UNA Personal Edition includes full support for standard features of source code editors, such as syntax highlighting, auto-complete, regular expression search and replace, and external tool integration. [...] UNA Personal Edition allows developers to edit, compile, test, and execute files in any and all languages, and is a nice complement to heavyweight IDEs such as Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea.

The screencast lasts about five minutes and shows the creation of a new PHP project, how to set up a "launcher" to access the PHP online documentation right in the browser, use the built-in syntax checker PHP has (lint) and execute the current file.

The Zend Developer Zone as posted a new screencast from Zend about the event debugging functionality offered with their Zend Platform product.

Zend Platform is a powerful tool both in development and in production. [...] One of the cool features of it is the Event Debugger. Here's a short screencast that demonstrates how it works and how it integrates with Zend Studio for Eclipse.

The screencast is only about three and a half minutes long, but they cram a lot of screenshots and output results into that time. Cal Evans himself does the narration.

Bill Staples has a new summary post on his IIS blog today covering some of the new things that IIS7 has to offer its community. Three of these pertain to PHP:

• A tutorial from Sabbir about installing PHP and MYSQL on an IIS server to get phpMyAdmin up and running (part one).
• A post from Drew Robbins about extensibility in PHP applications running on IIS.
• A how-to screencast on getting PHP and FastCGI working happily with IIS.

The Akelos project has posted a screencast of their framework in action, their answer to the "Creating a blog in 15 minutes" screencast that the Ruby on Rails folks tout so heavily.

This video shows you how to create a weblog engine from scratch using Akelos in just 12 minutes, we implement comments and an administrative interface, so we also had time to cover other Akelos PHP Framework areas.

You can either watch it there on the page or download the quicktime video to watch and learn.

Joel Moss submitted a link today about a screencast he's developed showing how to use database migrations with the CakePHP framework.

At 20 minutes, it is a little longer than I wanted, but hopefully future casts will shorten with experience. This is planned to be the first of a series of screencasts, not just about Migrations, but about life with Cake. So without further ado, I proudly present Screencast Episode 1: How to use CakePHP Database Migrations.

The screencast is a Quicktime movie download coming in at 32mb, but is worth checking out if you're interested in working with the migration functionality in CakePHP.

Felix Geisendorfer has a new post today showing off an example of his screencasting abilities. Specifically, the video looks at using vendor branching to keep your CakePHP installation up to date.

So here I go with my very first screencast to be published. The topic is how to use vendor branching with CakePHP which is one of many ways to keep your CakePHP version up to date.

The video is 15(ish) minutes long and covers, from start to finish, the process of grabbing the latest CakePHP build from the subversion repository and install it automatically to your system.

As a plus, Felix also includes links to the software he used to make the screencast for those that are curious.

On his blog today, Chris Hartjes has a quick screencast he's created showing off an interactive testing console he's worked up for use with the CakePHP framework.

I had suggested in an email to the CakePHP mailing list that an interactive console for doing testing of Models would be good. While at php|tek I spent a lot of time with the CakePHP guys talking about this. Out of it came some more ideas (like the ability to test your routes) and they even implemented a console that spits out API information for you. Very cool stuff. So, I decided to do a little screencast demo of a very early alpha version of the interactive console.

The screencast shows Chris running a test on his own classes, including demonstrating the built-in help the app offers.

In this new post on Mgccl's blog today, there's a response to these benchmarks from John Walsh concerning which is faster - a for loop or a while loop.

In this new post, Mgccl, he points out two other examples that show that a while loop is always faster than a for loop. To help prove the point, he's also included a screencast where he shows the code he's using to run the benchmarks (several different tests).

His results, matching the results from the other reports, not only shows that the while loop is faster (still only slightly), but also consumes less memory in the process.