Hiveminds Magazine has a recent post about bridging the gap between PHP and Java with the help of the Tomcat add-on for Apache.

Want to run PHP and access Java? Here's how to do it on Windows XP using Apace and Apache Tomcat. Apache Tomcat is a Servlet container developed at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Tomcat implements the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages (JSP) specifications from Sun Microsystems, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java code to run.

They go with the XAMPP distribution for the web server setup (for simplicity rather than on a unix-based system) and include the configuration and installation procedures to get everything up and running (screenshots included).

According to this post on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website, Microsoft has released a new five page PDF file titled "PHP on Windows: Community Involvement Improves Performance" discussing the relationship between the software giant and the language over recent years.

The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

They also mention Phlanger and the PHP for Microsoft Ajax projects.

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.

The PHP group has made a two quick updates to the recent release of PHP 5.2.6 for the Windows users out there:

The Windows installers and archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

These updated packages can be downloaded from the Downloads page on PHP.net as usual (with each updated package having a note indicating the change).

Christopher Jones has posted about the latest Instant Client release for the Intel chips running OS X:

Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.

The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.

The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.

A while back Mathew Turland posted a guide for getting a custom version of PHP compiled on a Windows machine.

At the encouragement of Elizabeth Smith, I went through the process (not-so-recently as of this blog entry) of compiling PHP on Windows.

He gives his "laundry list" of things to download/have access to and the link to Elizabeth's tutorial handy. Matthew found a few differences in his compile - an issue with IPv6 support and a pathing problem with the scripts trying to find libmysql.dll. He also throws in his instructions on getting aspell support compiled in.

The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted about an issue that's been found with PHP-GTK on a Windows Vista machine that can cause problems with how the OS handles memory (by Wim Stockman).

My work station is WinXp system and my friend where I had to create it for has the new Vista and somewhere over 9000 pictures to be managed. On my system everything worked fine, but on my friends system i always got the error can not open file.

Further testing revealed that it was the OS at fault - Vista wasn't handling the memory usage for the application correctly. When it was run directly from the file explorer (versus in the PHP-GTK console) though, it worked just fine.

Elizabeth Smith has set out on something she calls the Great Compile Project - her effort to get all dependencies for PHP and PECL compiled on (at the least) Visual Studio 2005 transparently and provided openly.

Anyone crazy enough to help out is more than welcome. I'm currently working on the GTK dependency stack, which will hit quite a few PHP dependencies and PECL extension dependencies in the process. And yes I'd love to submit my hacks/fixes upstream, if someone could find me some information (where do you send libiconv patches?)

Her post mentions some of the things she's already been working on to help further the cause - compiling various Open Source libraries, figuring out issues surrounding MiniGW and some examples of more complex dependency issues she's come across.

On the Developer Tutorials website, Michael Ross has written up a guide to step you through the installation of PHP on a Windows machine (on basically any flavor of Windows too).

Your PC can be turned into a fully capable Web development environment, by installing those three technologies, and configuring them so they communicate with one another. Admittedly, you can simply install and use PHP for its command-line processing. But for creating and testing dynamically generated Web pages on your local machine, then Apache needs to be already installed and working.

If you're wanting to set that part up before you get started and aren't sure how, check out the other tutorial to get started. He works through the process with you, including screenshots of the installer and how to toss MySQL in to the mix.

According to this post on the Zend Developer Zone website (a press release from Zend), they're classifying Windows Server 2008 as being certified "PHP ready".

This announcement is the latest in a series of collaborations between Zend and Microsoft aimed at delivering high performance and reliability for PHP applications running on the Windows Server platform. Several of these enhancements have been contributed back to the PHP community.

As a part of the project, Microsoft has even put effort into ensuring that several of the popular PHP packages (like Mambo and WordPress) work right out of teh box with a Windows Server 2008 installation.