The Semaphore Software blog has posted a new tutorial for those wanting to get into the Symfony2 framework and find out what it's all about. In this new tutorial they walk you through some of the basics of the framework and shows you how to get a basic first site up and running.

Symfony 2 has seemingly gained the attention of developers in recent times. Owing to the growing hype surrounding this framework, it is something that you ought to know about. A web application framework formed of reusable PHP components has been termed as Symfony. Symfony 2 is an updated version of this framework, and it enables developers to create websites and web applications with ease and convenience. The individual PHP components that set out to form this framework can be selected as per your design and development requirements. Let’s understand why Symfony is gaining popularity and why it should be used by you.

They start with the download and installation of the current version and where to place the resulting files. They briefly cover each of the main directories in the framework setup including a bit of sample code to illustrate. They then get into the bundling system and how it fits it with the overall ecosystem of your application, diving it up into functional "chunks". They show you how to register, configure and extend a bundle with some of your own functionality. Finally, the tutorial shows how to configure the database connection and run Doctrine to generate the table mappings.

On the DigitalOcean community blog they've posted a guide to setting up a LEPP server (Linux, Nginx, PHP and PostgreSQL) on a CentOS 7 instance (not specific to their own platform either, can be applied anywhere).

In this tutorial, we will create a simple web application in a two-tier architecture. Our base operating system for both nodes will be CentOS 7. The site will be powered by an Nginx web server running PHP code that talks to a PostgreSQL database. Instead of adopting a "top-down" approach seen in other LAMP or LEMP tutorials, we will use a "ground-up" approach: we will create a database tier first, then the web server and then see how the web server can connect to the database. We will call this configuration a LEPP (Linux, Nginx, PHP, PostgreSQL) stack.

They create a two-tier setup that involves the use of two CentOS systems (with examples from their own hosting options) and walk you through:

• Installing PostgreSQL
• Configuring PostgreSQL
• Updating the Database Server Firewall
• Creating and Populating the Database
• Installing Nginx
• Updating the Web Server Firewall
• Configuring Nginx
• Installing PHP
• Configuring PHP
• Creating the Web Application

It seems like a lot of steps but all of the necessary commands and configuration updates are included in each step so it's basically a copy and paste kind of walk-through.

The PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) has been helping to define standards that can be adopted by projects to make them easier to cross-pollinate and give developers more choices with less hassle. One of the latest to be proposed by the group is PSR-6, the Caching proposal. For those not familiar with it, Robert Hafner has written up an introduction to the proposal and what it all entails.

There’s been a lot of discussion about PSR-6, the php-fig caching interfaces, so I thought it was time to step in and describe what this system is all about. Be prepared to read far more about caching interfaces than you probably thought possible.

He starts with a look at why a standard like this might be necessary (and links to the PSR-6 docs for the official word). He does also mention some alternative proposals and gets into details - with code examples - of each of them and shows how they relate back to what's proposed in PSR-6. He finishes off the post with a brief Q&A trying to dispel some of the myths that have com up around the standard. These include "This is all just too complex", "The Pool/Item model isn’t used anywhere" and " This is just standardizing Stash", each with their own summary and feedback.

Juan Treminio has a recent post to his blog showing the complete steps you'll need to get a virtual machine up and running (using VirtualBox and a Ubuntu Seerver install), complete with PHP, MySQL, Samba and Apache.

Recently on r/php there was a thread asking users about their development environments. The usual answers came tumbling out – mostly about IDEs and methods for uploading their code (side note: FTP is a horrible way to do this!). Out of 144 responses, I noticed that very few mentioned virtual machines. Most that said anything about operating systems or platforms made it clear they were developing on their local machine, with no separation between their everyday driver and their development environment. This has got to stop, especially amongst PHP developers where we have tools like XAMPP that require nothing more than a simple zip extract to get up and running with your own “server”.

He walks you through the entire process, complete with screenshots and commands ready for copy & paste, to get your virtual machine server set up and working. The PHP install includes things like cURL, memcache, internationalization, GD and MySQL support. He also helps you get other tools like XDebug and PHPUnit installed.

This is definitely one of the more complete examples I've see of getting a VM set up and ready for development - if you've been wanting to try it out, I'd recommend this guide.

On the IIS.net site today (in the Web Platform Installer section) a new walk-through has been published on their latest release of the Web Platform Installer (version 2.0).

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including the IIS7, SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer.

The platform installer also allows you to install popular PHP-based software quickly and easily on your Windows servers (like WordPress, Drupal and SugarCRM). The walk through helps you to install the software, shows you some of the options you can choose for installable software and what you can find in each of the tabbed sections.

NETTUTS.com has posted what they consider everything you'll need to get started with the CodeIgniter PHP framework:

CodeIgniter is a web application framework for PHP. It enables developers to build web applications faster, and it offers many helpful code libraries and helpers which speed up tedious tasks in PHP. CodeIgniter is based on a modular design; meaning that you can implement specific libraries at your discretion - which adds to the speed of the framework. This tutorial will attempt to show you the basics of setting up the framework, including how to build a basic hello world application that uses the MVC approach.

They start by looking at why you would even use a framework, what CodeIgniter is and what the MVC design pattern is (including its flow). The rest of the tutorial is broken out into the "Getting Started" guide:

• Downloading CodeIgniter
• Installing and Exploring CodeIgniter
• Configuring CodeIgniter
• Testing CodeIgniter
• Configuring CodeIgniter Cont.
• Create the Helloworld Database
• Create the Helloworld Model
• Create the Helloworld Controller
• Create the Helloworld View
• Ta-da and Some Extras

As posted over on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a walk-through that's been posted for the just-released version of Zend's editor - Zend Studio 5.5.

Earlier this month, I posted the release announcement for Zend Studio 5.5. Today, I got an email from my friend Avigail pointing me to a new web cast recorded by Yossi Leon the Product Manager, Zender, and all around nice guy has released a web cast walk through of some of the new features in this latest release.

The webcast shows off features like the Java code completion, Zend Framework code completion and integration functionality, and Zend Platform integration. If you've been looking around for a new IDE to work up code in, give the demo a look and see what you think.

As posted over on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a walk-through that's been posted for the just-released version of Zend's editor - Zend Studio 5.5.

Earlier this month, I posted the release announcement for Zend Studio 5.5. Today, I got an email from my friend Avigail pointing me to a new web cast recorded by Yossi Leon the Product Manager, Zender, and all around nice guy has released a web cast walk through of some of the new features in this latest release.

The webcast shows off features like the Java code completion, Zend Framework code completion and integration functionality, and Zend Platform integration. If you've been looking around for a new IDE to work up code in, give the demo a look and see what you think.