Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

According to this new post on Davey Shafik's blog, there's now a Universal Binary of the latest beta version of Zend Studio available.

I just wanted to make a quick note, to say that Zend Studio 5.5 Beta, though the installer is PPC, the actual ZDE application is an OS X Universal Binary. The speed difference is more than noticable!

You can find out more about Zend Studio from this page on the Zend website and sign up to become a beta tester to gain access to this just off the line Universal Binary release.

Developer.com has posted a new article today looking at some of the features that tie PHP and the DB2 Universal Database together and make application development possible.

In a previous series of articles, I covered the IBM DB2 Universal DatabaseTM (DB2 UDB) plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that lets Microsoft-trained application developers quickly develop .NET applications that run against DB2 UDB databases, whether they reside on the z/OS, i5/OSTM, AIX, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, or Solaris operating systems.

In this article, I explore the features that make programming PHP-based DB2 UDB applications as seamless as possible and ultimately shorten the development cycle for these types of applications.

They start off introducing PHP and how it's used, but quickly move into describing the APIs that allows PHP to talk to DB2 UDB. They list out a few - the IBM extension for PHP, the PDO ODBC connection utility, and a fading option, the unified ODBC driver. They also spend some time looking at the Zend Core for IBM, including a small tour of the integration of it with the ZDE that's offered.