Jeff Moore has a new post showing an example of a feature that will be included in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release - closures/lambda functions.

Dagfinn has a post looking at using the new closure feature of PHP 5.3. He compares using foreach for iteration versus array_map. "Interesting," he concludes, "but not necessarily better than conventional alternatives." I agree for that case. Consider instead, a more complicated operation that requires a setup and a tear down after.

Jeff's example proposes that, instead of duplicating code, you use a lambda function to handle the custom parsing of the data as needed and pass that into the "doIt" function in his example.

Rob Allen has made a new post to his blog today showing how he set up PHP (with MySQL, Apache and a few other extensions) on his OS X (Leopard) system.

In the vein of some of Lorna's articles, this is more a note for myself than anything else. Not everything is explained in detail as it assumes you know how to use a command line...These are the steps I take to get the Apple supplied PHP working with GD, PDO_MySQL and Xdebug working on OS X 10.5.

He show how to: run Apache in 32 bit mode, download and install MySQL, setup and configure Apache, changes values in the php.ini and install the other extensions (like XDebug and the GD library). He uses the latest PHP 5 distribution at the time - PHP 5.2.6 - but these instructions should work for any in the PHP 5.x series you might want to use.

Max Horvath recently posted a how-to on getting the XDebug debugging support up and working in the Zend Studio for Eclipse software.

Zend Studio for Eclipse is a commercial edition of Eclipse plus the PDT plugin and various other additions. Unfortunately Zend decided to disable the Xdebug support of the Eclipse PDT plugin. Nonetheless if you'd like to use Xdebug for debugging your PHP scripts, follow these simple steps to restore the Xdebug functionality of Eclipse.

Its a simple six-step process (not including getting Zend Studio installed) to have the powerful debugging tool ready at your fingertips. You can find more information about setting up the tool here.

DevShed has a new tutorial on creating your very own VAMP setup - Vista, Apache, MySQL and PHP - running on your local machine.

With the abundance of communication between the browser and a server in these days of AJAX and JSON data interchange, there has never been a better time to get your own development web server set up so that you can test all those dynamic scripts you're writing. This article will show you how to do it using some of the most popular software.

They start by setting up an Apache web server and follow it with PHP first then MySQL second to round out the install. Most of the installers are pretty simple for the Windows-based systems (the developers of them have done a great job) so the install should go pretty smoothly.

Ever through about starting up your own custom version of a Digg-sort of site? Well, check out this new tutorial from the Developer Tutorials blog showing how to start it in "five minutes flat".

So, you want to start your own Digg or Reddit? Look no further. With PHP and MySQL, you can create your own Digg site in just five minutes. All you need is a PHP web server and MySQL database server; follow these instructions and you'll be up and running in time.

They use the Pligg software to do all of the hard work and describe its installation, configuration and use - simple and easy. You can find out more about Pligg on its website.

Stefan Mischook has pointed out a new section of the video tutorial portion of the site that's strictly devoted to help using the .

I just launched a new section on Killerphp.com on the Zend Framework. I figured it only made sense, given that we've built two live web applications based on it.

Videos that have already been posted to the section include setup videos part one and two as well as a look at working with the Zend_Controller and Zend_View components.

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a new tutorial that walks through the complete steps of setting up a Fedora 8 linux server with a full LAMP stack complete with email, DNS, FTP and ISPConfig support. They call it the "Perfect Server".

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora 8, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

It's a seven page process with plenty of screenshots and settings to help make the installation nice and easy.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a review of some software that seeks to protect your application's code by obfuscating its source - Iono.

What it does is take the source code and encodes it in a manner that makes it unreadable to humans. The code can then be safely distributed with your intellectual property intact. One of the applications that can be used to obfuscate and license your code is a combination of products called Iono and PHP Encoder by IonCube.

They look at the setup of the application, some of the requirements you'll need to get it working and a quick description of how it works (a "shopping cart" for users to purchase license for your software). The integration of the application into your files (the other half of the equation) can be done with one of five different kinds of licenses (including per page and a local license covering all files).

In her blog today, Alison Holloway offers a quick tip for developers out there trying to install PHP 5.2.2 on their Windows machine and running into trouble. Maybe it's the same issue?

I've just been setting up PHP 5.2.2 on Windows XP Pro, with Apache 2.0.59. I couldn't get Apache to find the correct php.ini file. It was looking in C:Windows, instead of where I installed PHP. The httpd.conf file told Apache to look in C:Program FilesPHP, but it wasn't. So none of the extensions were loading.

The problem? She wasn't putting in the right kind of slashes into her configuration file. It couldn't find the right path because of it. The issue isn't mentioned in the latest version of the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual (but will be in the future).

From the Venture Skills blog today, there's a tutorial that aims to help you develop a Digg-like site without any of the messy programming that can be involved - with a little help from Drupal.

Digg is a user content driven site, users submit links to article and sites that interest them and other uses either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The most popular sites get onto the front page and can have literally thousands of hits this is reffered to as the Digg effect. We are going to go step by step how you can develop such a site using Drupal CMS which is available from drupal.org if your unfamiliar with Drupal we have an overview here.

The real key to it all comes in with the plugins you install into your Drupal setup:

• Vote Up/Down module
• Links module
• Voting API
• Actions
• Voting Actions
• CRE recommendation

They walk you through the set up of Drupal first (screenshots show a Windows environment, but it can be any supported OS) before going into the admin for it and installing the plugins.

This article is just the first part in the series - check out part two and part three for the rest of the installation.