A pretty cool project in PHP - Memproxy is a caching proxy "server" that uses memcached for storing the cache. This project uses PHP scripts to handle caching using memcache.

The server uses memcached to store the information and automatically manages things like TTL, custom headers and is "application agnostic" all wrapped up in a small codebase with minimal dependencies.

Brian Moon has announced the release of the latest version of his memproxy tool that uses memcache to create a "server" to save the proxy information.

I put server in quotes because it is really just a PHP script that handles the caching and talking to the application servers. Apache and other HTTP servers already do a good job talking HTTP to a vast myriad of clients. I did not see any reason to reinvent the wheel.

Features of this new version include a TTL for the cached data, minimal dependencies for the application to use and a small code base consisting of two files. It also handles HTTP 1.1 requests, is transparent and applows pages to dynamically be specifically added and removed from the cache.

You can download this latest version from the project's page on the Google Code website.

On the Ibuildings blog, Ian Barber has a reminder to PHP developers out there used to their servers "just working" because of the popularity of LAMP. He recommends digging a little deeper to the "behind the scenes" of how the server is configured.

PHP programmers generally know what a good systems architecture should look like, but it is often a reality of development that they will have little input on the system itself until the last minute. In fact, it's far from uncommon for a developer to be faced with an off-the-shelf dedicated LAMP server, and left up to their own devices.

He recommends getting to know things like the package manager for your distribution (apt, yum, yast, etc), stripping down the modules your installation is using, check that all of the packages in use need to be enabled and ensure that the network connection is set up correctly and is what you need for the site.

In a response to this post on the PHP 10.0 Blog, Richard Heyes offers a method for what Stas was wanting:

OK, then what we do if something weird happens in production and we want to see the errors, but we don't want others to see them? [...] Maybe PHP could have some setting like display_errors=local which would enable display_errors for requests originating from developer machine but would disable it when outsider accesses it?

Richard's solution checks the HTTP_HOST value of the current request and, based on whether it's marked as "live" or "dev", uses a ini_set to change the display_errors setting to true/false.

The PHPEveryDay.com website has several new tutorials they've posted recently - here's the list:

• PHP WDDX: Creating Web Service Client
• PHP WDDX: Creating Web Service Server
• PHP WDDX: Unserializing Data
• PHP WDDX: Complex Serialization
• PHP WDDX: Simple Serialization Using PHP function
• PHP WDDX: Recordset Element
• PHP WDDX: Struct Element
• PHP WDDX: Using Array Elements
• PHP WDDX: Understanding Simple Data Type
• PHP WDDX: Understanding Data Elements
• PHP WDDX: Understanding Anatomy of WDDX
• PHP WDDX: Introduction

Check out PHPEveryDay.com for even more great tutorials and articles.

In a new article from PHPBuilder.com.au today, they talk about the "powerhouse of web services", SOAP, and how to get started working with it in PHP.

You've tried your hand at building mashups, experimented with a few RESTful Web services, maybe even started your own. Sure, you've got data sharing working. But how do you make your Web applications really talk to each other? In this tutorial, I'll show you how to take your Web applications to the next level with SOAP.

They opt to go with the NuSOAP method to consume another service and create your own simple one. They include a few code examples for either side and a (very) brief look at doing some debugging with what NuSOAP has to offer. One thing to note - if you have PHP5's SOAP extension compiled in and working, NuSOAP will throw an error about redeclaring a class name. This is because of a conflict between the naming of the SOAP extension's methods and NuSOAP.

Raphael Stolt, with some time on his hands, set up a local copy of Xinc, the "shiny new Continuous Integration(CI) server" as hosted on the Google code site and spent some time working with it:

Since then the idea of building a Growl publisher plugin for Xinc was traveling my mind repeatedly, so the following post will break this circle and show a possible approach to build such a plugin, which can be used to notify the build result for continuously integrated projects and thereby provide an on-point/immediate feedback.

He includes the plugin class (ready for cut&paste) as well as the task definition and how to hook it all in to the Xinc build system. There's also a little example of it in action - a happy/sad indicator showing if the build failed or was a success, right there on the desktop.

On the Developer Tutorials blog today, Akash Mehta has posted the second part of his look at the "ultimate web development environment", a continuation from this previous part.

Today I'm going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.

Tools mentioned this time include things like a local development server (invaluable) some PHP configuration tips and the editors they mentioned, things like Aptana, Eclipse and Zend Studio.

Korynn Bohn has posted a new tutorial/article on the Zend Developer Zone website that talks about (and advocates for) web services.

Web services are the coolest technology I know of that ends up turning everyone off. I don't know about you, but when I go to a lecture on Web services, invariably tons of acronyms come out [...] and then I start to nod off and dream about a land where free Krispy Kreme donuts grow on trees.

He reframes the web services world away from the acronyms and strict standards to more towards using it as a method of communication between apps, letting them engage in some friendly conversation. He uses the rest of the tutorial showing how to create an RSS reader of sorts using dashes of PEAR, XML, C#, XSLT, Ajax and Flex.

According to this post on the Zend Developer Zone website (a press release from Zend), they're classifying Windows Server 2008 as being certified "PHP ready".

This announcement is the latest in a series of collaborations between Zend and Microsoft aimed at delivering high performance and reliability for PHP applications running on the Windows Server platform. Several of these enhancements have been contributed back to the PHP community.

As a part of the project, Microsoft has even put effort into ensuring that several of the popular PHP packages (like Mambo and WordPress) work right out of teh box with a Windows Server 2008 installation.