Iwan Luijks has a recent post looking at how you can send email through PHP on Windows via the Apache James server.

eveloping in PHP on Windows? Yep me too! Unfortunatly in opposite to developing on Linux, sending e-mail from PHP on Windows requires some more setup than just a bit of sendmail configuration. In this post I explain how to setup an Apache James Server and use it for e-mailing from PHP, all from and to your localhost.

He walks you through the download and installation and includes the changes you'll need to make to get it up and running correctly. He helps you test it's working correctly and how to get PHP set up and pointing to it for mail delivery. Finally, he has a line of PHP (using mail) to test the install and send a sample message.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his site showing how you can work with a Azure SQL database directly from the UI of the popular PHP IDE, phpStorm.

PhpStorm provides us the possibility to connect to Windows Azure SQL Database right from within the IDE. In this post, we'll explore several options that are available for working with Windows Azure SQL Database: Setting up a database connection, creating a table, inserting and updating data, using the database console, generating a database diagram and database refactoring.

He includes the instructions and several screenshots showing each step of the above mentioned steps. The database diagram gives you a good overall view of your database structure and allows you to show a visualization of how the tables relate to each other. Note that, though this particular example shows it connecting to an Azure SQL database, the same setup can be used with lots of popular RDBMS out there.

On NetTuts.com there's a new screencast posted showing you how to get up and running with the upcoming version of a PHP framework that's been getting a lot of talk over the last year - Laravel 4.

As you may know, here at Nettuts+, we've covered the popular Laravel framework a great deal. With version 4 on the near horizon, I've received quite a few emails and comments, requesting a screencast that describes exactly how to clone and work with the alpha version of Laravel 4, as well as Composer. Hope this helps!

You can view the screencast using the in-page player or you can download the video to have it at a bit higher resolution.

In a previous post Pablo Viquez talked about integrating JMeter and Zend Debugger for testing your PHP applications. In this new post he goes one more step in and talks about integrating Eclipse, JMeter and using XDebug this time for the debugging.

In a previous post I wrote about doing step by step debugging using Zend Debugger and Zend Studio making the calls from JMeter, however not everyone has Zend Server or Zend Studio installed, and since XDebug is an awesome project I though that will be awesome to do the same using XDebug. [...] As explained previously, using the browser for API debugging can be pretty hard or nearly impossible unless you build some sort of UI, which normally I do not have time to do, so JMeter is perfect for the job!

He includes the configuration changes that'll need to be made to Apache and how to set up and configure the new project in Eclipse. He also includes the setup of the jMeter plan (using his example) and executing it to execute the script/get the debugging information.

Pablo Viquez has a new post to his site today showing you how to debug your PHP code with the help of JMeter (an Apache project) that tests functional behavior and performance and the Zend Debugger.

Now, I think JMeter is awesome, no doubt about it, however what if I want to test something while developing a new API Endpoint? well I used to be accustom to the nasty var_dump(); exit; combination or if the API was already completed I used to do error_log() everywhere and figure out the results. [...] I love the easy integration that Zend Server has with Zend Studio for debugging and I though to myself, why not just change the client that triggers the debugging console so instead of the browser use JMeter, at the end both uses HTTP so it should work, well guess what, IT DOES, and It's awesome. No more print_r, error_log, var_dump in the API, lets do the Step by Step debugging with JMeter!

He walks you through the steps needed to get it all set up and working together, complete with screenshots. Really, you can use whatever debugger setup you prefer (with something like Xdebug) and have jMeter execute on top of that - there's no interface directly between the debugger and jMeter.

New on the "Do It Yourself!" web development site, there's a post showing you how to setup Composer on Windows to manage the dependencies in your applications.

Composer exists to overcome the problem [with PECL and PEAR being system-wide], composer is a dependencies manager that come in a form of command utilities, composer make it possible to 'plug and play' PHP packages across application no matter what frameworks we are using as long as the packages follow the shared format. With composer we can define our project dependencies simply in a 'composer.json' file, and later on we can install and update these dependencies automatically.

He introduces the Composer tool and then shows how to set it up via the Windows installer (with screenshots). There's two ways to set it up - "Basic" that does the install in one project and "Global" that installs it somewhere outside of the current project, available to all projects.

On the Fortrabbit.com blog, there's a new post looking at a system for multi-stage deployment at a high level, applicable to most of the tools out there.

This article targets new developers and developers which never had the chance working with multi versioned websites before. If this fit's you: Read it. Staging is a good tool in your belt you won't regret to know. [...] You, your co-developers, authors and whatnot using [staging] to prepare and test stuff which is to be released into production. In short: you do not perform open-heart surgery by coding directly on the production website.

He talks about the "stages" part of the "multi-stage" structure, mentioning the separation of purpose they provide and an example of a three level configuration (dev, staging, production). An optional fourth level can be added as well for testing purposes. There are some downsides to this approach, though: data synchronization, code deployment delay and complexity. There's also a mention of gitflow and how it could help make this environment easier to set up for your applications.

Rob Allen has posted some notes to his site helping you get PHP set up on OSX Lion (10.8) successfully.

With OS X 10.8, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with Xdebug, PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.8.

He's broken it up into a few sections including the MySQL setup, Apache configuration , updating the main php.ini and setting up PHPUnit ("and friends") for your testing. He also includes setup instructions for the mcrypt and the PECL OAuth extensions.

On DZone.com today they've posted the second part of their series looking at using the Neo4j database from your PHP applications.

This is Part 2 of a series on setting up a development environment for building projects using the graph database Neo4j and PHP. In Part 1 of this series, we set up unit test and development databases. In this part, we'll build a skeleton project that includes unit tests, and a minimalistic user interface.

The post includes the code to create the testing harness, a bootstrap file and a basic test to handle the checks on deletion of an "Actor". The rest of the post shows how to use the connection to find an Actor based on input from the user via a form.

On the DeveloperDrive.com site today there's a new post with five easy steps you can take to help increase the security of your PHP-based applications.

For many years, PHP has been a stable, inexpensive platform on which to operate web-based applications. Like most web-based platforms, PHP is vulnerable to external attacks. Developers, database architects and system administrators should take precautions before deploying PHP applications to a live server. Most of these techniques can be accomplished with a few lines of code or a slight adjustment to the application settings.

The five tips they list range from general "best practice" kinds of things to a bit more specific:

• Manage Setup Scripts
• Include Files (using ".php" not ".inc")
• MD5 vs. SHA
• Automatic Global Variables (no longer an issue in recent releases, 5.4.x)
• Initialize Variables and Values