Mohammed Berdai has a quick tutorial posted about getting a full installation of PostgreSQL and phpPgAdmin up and working in an XAMPP environment.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl, plus many additional modules. The whole package is well integrated and can save a lot of time and hassle for the inexperienced web developer. [...] phpPgAdmin is a web-based administration tool for PostgreSQL, exactly as phpMyAdmin for MySQL.

It's a simple three step process (with a few sub-steps inside each) to get the system up and running - basically: install XAMPP, install PostgreSQL and install phpPgAdmin.

Gyorgy Fekete has provided what he calls a complete guide to PHP development on Mac OS X in a recent blog entry.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

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).

As mentioned by Elizabeth Naramore on the php|architect website today, the XAMPP project has released a new version of their software to automagically install Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl.

From ApacheFriends.org:

In all versions we updated Apache to 2.2.6, PHP to 5.2.4 and phpMyAdmin to 2.11.1. (Find more details on the specific download page.) I'm sorry to say, but under Windows we currently have problems with the new Apache and mod_perl, which doesn't work at all. We hope to find a solution soon.

Links to download the version for your OS of choice (Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris) can be found on this page of the project's website.

In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).

I've been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, it's probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.

Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.

As per php|architect the XAMPP Group has released ther results of a survey for users of the package.

Included in the spotlights of the results were things like:

• Almost half of the XAMPP users would like to also have ASP.NET bundled with XAMPP
• XAMPP is popular not only in private use (91%) but also in the non-profit and educational sectors
• XAMPP users are generally pretty neutral when it comes to frameworks and add-on packages like phpBB and Wordpress being bundled with the package
• Over half would like to see PostgreSQL bundled also, not just MySQL

From Irakli Nadareishvili's blog today, there's a new post that shows exactly how to get the PECL memcache client up and working with a default XAMPP installation in PHP4.

XAMPP is an absolutely wonderful, packaged, self-contained distribution of apache, mysql, php and tons of hard-to-install php extensions. [...] However, even with a long list of packaged extensions, obviously there may be a need to install an additional one. PECL Memcache client of memcached distributed cache server, is a very probable candidate for high-load systems.

Unfortunately, he notes, the default installation of XAMPP has a broken version of PECL installed and doesn't quite work like it should when new packages are installed. Thankfully, though, he found a workaround for the problem in the form of fourteen (well, really thirteen) easy steps involving things as simple as copying files, running a "make", and changing configuration settings to get things up and working.

He also includes a common error he had to figure out when making his install too - an issue where the installation might not be able to find the right libraries.

Lee Underwood shares a handy bit of software in this quick article on Developer.com - a GUI program that helps you execute your PHP scripts on Windows without the setup time of something like XAMPP.

There's no need to install a server and PHP and then try to coordinate them in order to get them to work together. Script GUI comes in one compact package. It includes a server, which is only available to the built-in browser and is a nice security feature. In addition, it supports CGI, virtual hosts, directory aliases, custom error documents and understands most commands in .htaccess files.

He tell how it works (pretty much just install and go) and how it can be configured to work with virtual hosts. Best of all, it already comes with the latest version of PHP for Windows and can interface with several of the popular databases out there.

PHPMac.com has a quick new tutorial posted today showing Mac developers out there how to get the Xampp pakcage on their Intel-based system.

Xampp makes things easy - as easy as:

• Download/install
• change the httpd.conf
• sudo into the root account
• start up the application with a single command

You can get complete details for this package (as well as packages for other platforms) from the Xampp website.