php installation

Apple computers and OS X are quite common here at Liip (and local.ch) as developer machines.

But while OS X comes with a not-too-old PHP installation, it nevertheless doesn't have everything we need (for example the infamous intl extension) and it's not that easily extendable with self-compiled extensions.

New on the Web Builder Zone today, there's an article about DateTime in PHP5 from Giorgio Sironi introducing you to this very handy built-in feature.

From the PHPSnippets.info site there's a recent post about using a conversion tool from Google to convert currency values from one type to another.

The Register on a new EU law, due to go into effect next year, that requires sites to ask for consent prior to storing cookies on a user’s browser:

An exception exists where the cookie is “strictly necessary” for the provision of a service “explicitly requested” by the user – so cookies can take a user from a product page to a checkout without the need for consent.

Other cookies will require prior consent, though, and the law must be implemented in member states by May 2011.

Gonzalo Ayuso came across a situation where he needed to create a factory method inside of multiple classes but didn't want to have to create them each time.

With class inheritance there had to be another way.

Brandon Savage has written up a look at the Suhosin patch for PHP (a project lead by Stefan Esser), what it can do for your PHP installation and his opinion on the benefits.

New on the Content with Style blog today there's this tutorial looking at full-text searching combining Xapian and PHP to replace the slower full-text methods in something like a MySQL database.

Hasin Hayder has a new post talking about the new memcached extension for PHP (memcached from PECL) and how it can be used to store sessions data.

In this quick post to his blog Arnold Daniels points out their patched version of the Suhosin hardening patch for PHP 5.3.

On the Server-Side Magazine site there's a recent post for the cutting edge developers out there that want to get to testing their code on PHP 5.3 but don't want to cause issues with their current environment.

The solution? Install Ubuntu in a VirutalBox instance!