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 SitePoint.com today there’s a new podcast posted, an interview with Tim Boronczyk, the managing editor of their PHPMaster tutorial site.

Episode 159 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Tim Boronczyk (@zaemis), the Managing Editor of phpmaster.com about the new features in PHP5.4, PHP’s strengths and weaknesses, and the DIY approach of the PHP community.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directory or subscribing to their feed.

The schedule for this year’s OSCON conference has officially been announced and there’s several PHP sessions on the schedule this year including:

• The MicroPHP Manifesto (Ed Finkler)
• Get Some Rest: Best RESTful API Practices (Lorna Mitchell)
• Daemonizing PHP (Andy Blyler)
• A Stitch In Time Saves Nine: Solving the N+1 Problem (Paul Jones)
• Social Commerce with magento and Open Graph (John Jawed)

There’s lots more on the list too, so check out the full list for the PHP track at this year’s event! OSCON is being held July 16-20th in Portland, Oregon. For more information on tickets see this page on the conference site.

The Code2Learn site has posted another in their CodeIgniter “series” about producing various kinds of output from an application based on this framework. In this new article Farhan Khwaja shows how to output a CSV-formatted file.

I have already written posts on how to generate pdf files using CodeIgniter Framework and also on how to generate tabulated pdf file using CodeIgniter Framework. This post will help you to generate a CSV file using CodeIgniter. The data for the CSV File will be taken from the MySQL Database and will be put into the CSV File.

He includes the source for a basic “Generate” controller class that uses a custom “CSV_Helper” to do the work. It has two methods – one to transform array data and another to take the database result object and extract each record.

On the NetTuts.com site today there’s a new tutorial showing how to use XHProf to profile CodeIgniter-based applications and fidn the spots that are causing the most overhead/issues.

XHProf will provide you with a hierarchical profile of the functions your application calls, allowing you to follow the chain of events that lead up to resource intensive code running. You’ll be able to see exactly how much wall time (the actual time elapsed), CPU time and memory your application uses. This tutorial will help you get XHProf installed on your server, and integrated with your CodeIgniter application via hooks so that you can start profiling your application, in a production environment, straight away. Everything you see here was written for Ubuntu 10.04 – the latest LTS release at the time of writing.

They walk you through the installation of the tool (via a wget of the source), show you how to integrate it with CodeIgniter via hooks and include a simple class that is called to execute and report on the findings. Some sample output is included as well as some general tips on interpreting the results.

On Dzone.com there’s a book review from Ivan Ilijasic covering a recently released title from Packt Publishing, the “PHP Ajax Cookbook” (by Milan Sedliak, Rajesh Jeba R. Anbiah and Roshan Bhattarai). His review gives a “one minute bottom line” about the book and its contents.

I’ve been in PHP development for more than 10 years and this book is really useful material. I could recommend it to beginners and experienced developers. From my point of view, there are three types of developer books – complete byte-to-byte fat books, introduction books and cookbooks. I want my cookbook to have useful and simple to use recipes. This book fulfilled my expectations.

He mentions some of the topics that the book covers including javascript libraries and frameworks (mostly jQuery) and recipes for things like form validation, dynamic content, pagination and drag and drop functionality. He also points out some coverage of testing and debugging content as well as web service “mashups” and mobile app development.

In a recent post to his blog Hakre looks at iterating over iterators (multiples all at once) using either the Append Iterator or the MultipleIterator.

PHP’s SPL has two build-in Iterators that deal with multiple iterators at once: AppendIterator and MultipleIterator. In this posting I’ll cover both a bit.

He gives some sample code for each – showing how to use the AppendIterator to combine multiple iterators into one set and using the MultipleIterator to attach (not append/merge into one set) multiple iterator objects to a single, iteratable object. He als mentions a “lost” iterator, the DualIterator that never made it out of a SVN repository and into the main codebase.

As mentioned on the main PHP.net site, the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 5.4.x series is now available for testing:

This is the 2nd release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. The release candidate fixes a critical issue when using the internal classes in multiple threads. A complete list of changes since the last release candidate can be found in the NEWS file.

The source packages can be downloaded from the main QA site and the Windows binary packages from the Windows QA site.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a quick new post to his blog with a handy tip for Composer and Cilex/Silex users when dealing with custom namespaces.

For a new proof of concept application I’m building, I need both a simple web interface as well as some commandline tools. I decided to use Silex for the web interface and Cilex for the CLI tools, and opted for using Composer for installing these dependencies into my project. I ran into some issues with the custom project libraries I was building for this application however. Registering my custom namespace into Silex and Cilex didn’t result in the classes being loaded for some reason. Composer helped me out though.

His solution involves letting Composer be the default autoloader for the application via an “autoloader” configuration option in the “composer.json” (that can also take a classmap option if you’re not PSR-0 compliant, see here).

The jsDay and phpDay conferences have just posted their final schedules and from the looks of them, they’re both going to be great events!

Sessions from jsDay include:

• Backbone.js FTW! (Pierre Spring)
• JavaScript Application Architecture (Brandon Keepers)
• Ember.js – Focus on your app not on boilerplate code (Garret Alfert)
• Getting Started with Nodejitsu (Nuno Job)
• Go to hell Flash! We have Open Web! (Michal Budzynski)

Sessions from phpDay include:

• Test Driven Development with Symfony 2 (Jacopo Romei)
• Scalable architectures: Taming the Twitter Firehose (Lorenzo Alberton)
• Get’em in shape: let customers appreciate the agile workflow (Stefano Maraspin)
• An introduction to Phing the PHP build system (Jeremy Coates)

For more information about these events and to get your tickets, see the sites for each conference: phpDay, jsDay.