Hiveminds Magazine has a recent post about bridging the gap between PHP and Java with the help of the Tomcat add-on for Apache.

Want to run PHP and access Java? Here's how to do it on Windows XP using Apace and Apache Tomcat. Apache Tomcat is a Servlet container developed at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Tomcat implements the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages (JSP) specifications from Sun Microsystems, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java code to run.

They go with the XAMPP distribution for the web server setup (for simplicity rather than on a unix-based system) and include the configuration and installation procedures to get everything up and running (screenshots included).

The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted about enabling the code completion for Zend Studio to work with the PHP-GTK specific functionality.

Enabling PHP-GTK2 code completion in Zend Studio 5.5 for a project is very simple. The following example is given on Windows, but the steps should be the same on any supported platform.

Screenshots are also included in the step-by-step process. You'll need to run a bit of code to build the completion file, but after that it's just a few quick clicks away.

PHPBuilder.com.au continues their look at using phpMyAdmin in this new part of the series today. This new article focuses on using the interface to make queries against the data in your tables.

The previous article gave you an overview of the phpMyAdmin interface and functionality. It's now time to dive in further and learn how to construct and execute queries.

They show (complete with screenshots) how to use the GUI to build the different parts of your query - a simple SELECT statement with a join pulling together the customer information and their addresses.

On the Builder.com.au site today, there's an introduction posted to walk you through one of the most popular web-based database administration tools for PHP/MySQL on the web, phpMyAdmin.

phpMyAdmin is a HTML interface developed in PHP, for creating and managing MySQL databases. Before you download and install the latest version, have a look at the requirements section on the phpMyAdmin Wiki.

They look at the overall interface, how to set up users, making a new database, creating a table inside of it, pushing data into the table and the various options that the tool has to help you manage your database(s) - all with nice big screenshots to show you where it all is.

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

On the Developer Tutorials website, there's a new guide that steps you through the installation of a simple e-commerce platform available for free from Devellion Limited.

In this tutorial, we will get an introduction to CubeCart, created and distributed by Devellion Limited. Their flagship product is one of the easiest low-cost e-commerce solutions available, and is growing in popularity. Note that CubeCart is not technically open source, since the code cannot be freely redistributed. On the other hand, most of the code is not protected using encoding, and can thus be read and understood.

They go through the selection process - picking which version of their software is right for you - and the installation, configuration and how to verify that everything's up and running smoothly. Screenshots are included to help along the way.

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted this new guide on how to install one of the more popular PHP content management systems out there - Drupal.

One of the most popular CMSs is Drupal, partly because it offers all of the aforesaid features, and partly because developers familiar with PHP (the language used by Drupal) can modify the functioning and appearance of almost every aspect of Drupal.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to install and configure a brand-new Drupal Web site from scratch. We will also touch upon the basics of adding content to a Drupal installation.

They include useful screenshots along the way as well, helping to guide you through the process a bit better than with just words. There's tons of configuration options that you could mess with in a Drupal installation, but they do well to give you the essential ones that you'll need to get it up and running smoothly.

Rob Allen has posted an example - a "super simple, complete example" of how to use the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework to create a basic contact form.

Following on from the Simple Zend_Layout Example, Zend_Form is now in the trunk, so here's a super simple, complete example that shows it in action.

He includes screenshots of the different steps along the way - the form that will be generated, the structure of the directories and, of course, the contents of the PHP files to make things happen. He also mentions the use of Decorators (the design pattern) to assign the various attributes of the form element object.

Michael Kimsal points out the posting of the latest part of his "Grails for PHP developers" series to his blog site - Part Five of the series.

I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers". Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself. Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful. I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.

This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.

On the PHP-GTK Community site, there's this post from Janosch Graf about a PHP-GTK desktop project (a desktop environment inside of a PHP-GTK shell) called php-desktop.

php-desktop emulates a desktop using KDE programs/icons

php-desktop is tested with KDE. It also uses KDE programs (for example kde-open) and KDE icons. php-desktop gets the icon by the mimetype of a file. If the file is a desktop-file php-desktop gets the icon from there.

You can check out a screenshot of the project for a preview of what it's like or just download the archive and try it out for yourself.