In a new post to his blog Brian Swan explains why the latest versions of PHP (the 5.3.x series) are faster now on Windows than some previous versions have been. (Hint: updated technology can work wonders sometimes)

[Rasmus Lerdorf recently said at a Seattle meetup] "If you aren’t running PHP 5.3 on Windows, you’re lucky…because you have a 40% performance boost coming." He clarified this by saying that, with some help from Microsoft, improvements were made in PHP 5.3 that led to a 40% performance improvement of PHP on Windows. Because he didn’t go into the details of why this performance boost was realized, I got questions in email the next day asking about why.

The information in a borrowed slide (from a presentation by Pierre Joye) shows what the differences between the versions are - things like the use of a more modern compiler (VC9 vs VC6), calls to the Win32 API directly and better library management.

Daniel Cousineau has posted briefly about a relatively new addition to the feature set of the upcoming PHP 5.3 release - closures.

I'm fairly excited because as of only a week or so ago I found the closures rfc, and not only did I find that the rfc has a working patch, apparently it's already in PHP 5.3. You see, apparently it's not good enough that we get name spaces and late static binding, oh no, we get closures too!

He downloaded a snapshot and gave it a try - code examples are included with his post.

Felix Geisendorfer shows, in a new blog post today, how to setup XDebug (the popular debugging extension for PHP) on a Mac OSx (or Win32/Linux) system.

One of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source.

His is a four step process of installing XDebug support on his MAMP setup - including a few configuration directives you'll need to apply to get XDebug support included.

Felix Geisendorfer shows, in a new blog post today, how to setup XDebug (the popular debugging extension for PHP) on a Mac OSx (or Win32/Linux) system.

One of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source.

His is a four step process of installing XDebug support on his MAMP setup - including a few configuration directives you'll need to apply to get XDebug support included.

Edin Kadribasic has released the latest update for his Win32 builds in the PHP 4.4.x series - PHP 4.4.5-win32 with the MySQL 5.0.22 drivers.

There's a direct download here which contains two files. Drop these top files into your current install folder and you should be good to go (it will overwrite one file and insert another).

Previous versions can be found as tagged on his blog.

Edin Kadribasic has released the latest update for his Win32 builds in the PHP 4.4.x series - PHP 4.4.5-win32 with the MySQL 5.0.22 drivers.

There's a direct download here which contains two files. Drop these top files into your current install folder and you should be good to go (it will overwrite one file and insert another).

Previous versions can be found as tagged on his blog.

Ilia Alshanetsky, the release manager for the PHP 5.2.x series has officially announced the release of the latest Release Candidate for the series - PHP 5.2.0RC6.

The 5.2.0 release is turning to be quite an adventure, we can't seem to get the bloody thing out. Hopefully RC6 will be the last release candidate, but given that I've said that about the last 3RCs, who knows...

You can grab the release snapshots from his section of the Downloads on PHP.net (with Win32 binaries to follow soon). So, grab it, test it, find those bugs, and help the PHP team get this next big upgrade out the door!

UPDATE: the Windows binaries have been posted by Edin now.

Ilia Alshanetsky, the release manager for the PHP 5.2.x series has officially announced the release of the latest Release Candidate for the series - PHP 5.2.0RC6.

The 5.2.0 release is turning to be quite an adventure, we can't seem to get the bloody thing out. Hopefully RC6 will be the last release candidate, but given that I've said that about the last 3RCs, who knows...

You can grab the release snapshots from his section of the Downloads on PHP.net (with Win32 binaries to follow soon). So, grab it, test it, find those bugs, and help the PHP team get this next big upgrade out the door!

UPDATE: the Windows binaries have been posted by Edin now.

Pierre-Alain Joye has made an update to his information about building Cairo on Windows with more fixes and the creation of a dedicated page for the project.

I fixed a possible issue with PDF and PS support, it should work way better now. The cairo_build_windows archive has been updated and a decent freetype2 is now included (from gnuwin32). The build system has been tested with VC++ Express and VC.net 2003. Also a configure.bat is now included, it is a simple "alias" for "cscript /nologo configure.js ". You can call it just like any real configure.

As mentioned, a project homepage has been set up for cairo-win32, and can be found here along with some results of it: PNG file, PDF file.

Pierre-Alain Joye has made an update to his information about building Cairo on Windows with more fixes and the creation of a dedicated page for the project.

I fixed a possible issue with PDF and PS support, it should work way better now. The cairo_build_windows archive has been updated and a decent freetype2 is now included (from gnuwin32). The build system has been tested with VC++ Express and VC.net 2003. Also a configure.bat is now included, it is a simple "alias" for "cscript /nologo configure.js ". You can call it just like any real configure.

As mentioned, a project homepage has been set up for cairo-win32, and can be found here along with some results of it: PNG file, PDF file.