In a new post to his site Derick Rethans talks about "analemmas" and shows how to use PHP's own DateTime handling to determine the locations of the sun at different intervals (that's what an "analemma" tracks).

Last week I listened to an The Sceptics' Guide to the Universe where the word of the week was "But as I am currently starting to update the Guide to Date and Time Programming for a second edition, I was wondering whether I could create an analemma from existing PHP functions. Unfortunately, PHP only provides functionality to calculate when the Sun is at its highest point, through date_sun_info().

He includes an example of this function in use to determine the time the sun was at its zenith. While PHP by itself can't calculate the position, Derick remembered a PHP extension he wrote that could help: php-solarsystem. He includes some code using this functionality to iterate and locate the sun via its azimuth and altitude based on his choice of location (London). The result is a CSV export of data that he then drops in to gnuplot to create the graph of the analemma during that time.

The NetBeans team (Sun) has recently announced namspace support or PHP development in their IDE. They've also just posted a screencast showing how this new functionality works.

We've now finished a screencast demonstrating PHP 5.3 namespace support in NetBeans IDE 6.8. (See Code Completion for Namespaces part I). The screencast also shows code hints for assigning variables, namespace naming hints, and how to set the options for PHP code completion.

You can check out the screencast in the bog entry or directly. You can find out more about the NetBeans IDE at Sun's NetBeans for PHP website.

According to this new post on the NetBeans blog, a new feature - code coverage support - has been added to the most recent version of the IDE.

After a few days, we would like to inform you that code coverage for PHP has been added to the NetBeans IDE. Thanks to PHPUnit (version 3.3 or newer required) we are able to provide code coverage for PHP files in a similar way as for Ruby or Python.

They give the step-by-step (screenshotted) process for running a coverage report on your current project and how to view which tests passed or failed validation.

PHP is always thought of as an open source free spirit that survives on the work that's done by the community around it. While there's no denying the massive amounts of work done by developers of the language, there's also another group that is doing their part to help the language flourish - commercial entities. Scott MacVicar takes a look at a few of them in this new post to his blog.

I thought I’d start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP. The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

Besides the hardware support there's also companies willing to allow their employees time to work on the project (such as Pierre from Microsoft). Other companies that have made large contributions include IBM's large amount of testing, Sun's work to improve PHP on Solaris and, of course, Zend's support of the project and the time its employees spend developing the language.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Kevin Yank takes a look at a recent version of the NetBeans IDE (version 6.5) that comes bundled with improved PHP support.

Long dismissed as a "toy Java IDE", NetBeans - Sun's open source Integrated Development Evironment (IDE)—has really grown up in recent years. No longer is it just for Java, either: for web developers, NetBeans 6.5 now supports Ruby and PHP out of the box. Surprisingly, that support is so good that it now compares favourably to more established competitors like Eclipse, Komodo IDE, and Zend Studio.

He mentions the built-in/user-defined auto-complete the has built in as well as code templates, support for phpdoc documentation blocks, and other functionality for helping with Javascript, HTML and CSS.

David Parra has posted his method for getting the latest version of PHP compiled under a machine running OpenSolaris.

As I switched my main system recently from Linux to OpenSolaris I compiled PHP. Quiet obvious things are a little bit different on Solaris. The usual ./buildconf && ./configure && make install doesn't work anymore. The good news: It's not much harder.

A few extra packages are required (like SUNWgmake, SUNWgcc and SUNWbison) and the Re2c library, but after that, it's just like a normal install. All commands needed to make the build are included in the post.

Sun is trying to decide which of the PHP frameworks is wants to support in its next version of NetBeans. The symfony group wants you to vote for them if you're a fan of the framework and want to see the support included.

NetBeans, the open-source development environment sponsored by Sun, is planning to include support for PHP frameworks in its upcoming versions. As there are so many PHP frameworks, NetBeans developers have organized a public election to choose the two PHP frameworks that will be initially supported.

Instructions on how to vote are included (you will need to register to get to the voting form).

With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.

With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.

Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.

From this post on the Zend Developer Zone, we learn about an article over on the Sun Developer Network by Joe McCabe about installing PHP on a Sun Java System Web Server version 7.0.

un Java System Web Server is a mature, highly scalable, and secure web server that provides process redundancy, request scalability, and a wide range of application programming interfaces (APIs) to create and serve dynamic content. This document describes how to install and use PHP with Sun Java System Web Server (hereafter Web Server).

The tutorial is divided up into seven sections (including some reference material):

• Understanding PHP and Web Server
• Running the PHP Engine
• Installing the PHP Engine as a CGI Program
• Installing the PHP Engine as a FastCGI Server
• Installing the PHP Engine as an NSAPI Plugin
• Conclusion
• References

For each, there's plenty of code/configuration options to help clarify what needs to be set up no matter if you need the CGI version, FastCGI, or the NSAPI plugin up and running.

From this post on the Zend Developer Zone, we learn about an article over on the Sun Developer Network by Joe McCabe about installing PHP on a Sun Java System Web Server version 7.0.

un Java System Web Server is a mature, highly scalable, and secure web server that provides process redundancy, request scalability, and a wide range of application programming interfaces (APIs) to create and serve dynamic content. This document describes how to install and use PHP with Sun Java System Web Server (hereafter Web Server).

The tutorial is divided up into seven sections (including some reference material):

• Understanding PHP and Web Server
• Running the PHP Engine
• Installing the PHP Engine as a CGI Program
• Installing the PHP Engine as a FastCGI Server
• Installing the PHP Engine as an NSAPI Plugin
• Conclusion
• References

For each, there's plenty of code/configuration options to help clarify what needs to be set up no matter if you need the CGI version, FastCGI, or the NSAPI plugin up and running.