Just as I was finishing my review of the beta version of Zend Server CE, Zend proudly announced the release of Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition (CE). So I had to start all over again with a fresh installation of Zend Server CE 4.0.1. I was pleased to see that they fixed some of the quirks and bugs I had encountered in the beta version, but oddly enough they introduced some new ones too. Read more…
Virtualization is a hot topic in ICT. How can you put this to use at home and more specifically on your Mac ? You can use it to run Windows on your Mac, but also to try out different flavors of Linux or to run a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) development server. If you have a spare recent pc you can install a baremetal hypervisor like XenServer5, but that’s a different story. If you want to install a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor on your MacBook, Mac mini or iMac, there are a number of solutions available. To name a few: VMWare, Parallels, Q and VirtualBox.
First requirement: it has to be free, free as in made freely available by the software vendor, not as in a pirated or illegal copy. So skip VMWare (unless you stick with the VMWare Player) and Parallels.
Second requirement: it must be a hypervisor project, preferably open source, with active development, user groups, forums and good documentation.
So I chose VirtualBox. For the cross-platformers among you, like myself, VirtualBox also runs on Windows, Linux and OpenSolaris and supports a large number of guest operating systems including Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris, OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
But this post will be about installing a virtual Ubuntu LAMP or web server on Mac OS X using VirtualBox. Read more…
I already knew how to run PHP scripts from the command line (CLI), although I never really used it. What was new to me was that there are 2 ways of doing this. The first one is by using the php command and the second, and new for me, is by adding a shebang on the first line of your script.
Why would you want to use PHP CLI ? Well you don’t have to learn another programming language like perl or bash to make shell scripts, you can run cron jobs in PHP and you can reuse code from a website for example in your shell script. Read more…
php|architect
At the end of September php|architect had some great news to announce concerning their magazine: a new logo, full colour printing and a new subscription price.
Ohoh, a new subscription price is usually bad news.
What was the old situation: they offered 3 different types of subscription to their PHP magazine ‘php|architect’, namely paper only, pdf only and both.
I had a subscription to the pdf only, this was also the cheapest subscription.
In the new situation they will offer the paper and pdf together for less than the pdf version in the old situation. So the subscribers will receive more value for less money and that in these times.
So where is the catch ? Read more…
I honestly thought that the namespace separator for PHP was a done deal, namely ‘::’. It was originally planned to introduce namespaces in PHP6, but they moved it to the upcoming PHP 5.3 and due to problems implementing that they made a last minute change to ‘\’.
A lot of people are happy that PHP will finally have support for namespaces, but a lot of people also think they made a really bad choice for the separator. Read more…
