The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today on the topic of installing both PHP4 and PHP5 at the same time (well, have them installed at the same time) on one Windows XP machine. The kicker is that it only uses one Apache 2 installation and runs on a single port. Interested?

One thing is sure, the fifth version of this great programming language is much better than all the previous ones, and sooner or later it will become ubiquitous. But what to do until then? Is it possible to have the 'best of both worlds'?

Is it possible to have the both versions of PHP installed on the same computer without conflicts, so one can maintain old PHP 4 projects, and develop new PHP 5 code? The answer is, yes.

The author (Slobodan Pavkov) steps you through his solution:

• how to prepare the machine for the installation and what you need to download
• how to get things installed and configured
• and a simple test to make sure things are in order

The key to the seperation is editing the hosts file on the machine and placing the files in different directories - one for PHP5 files and another for PHP4.

For all of the readers of Oracle's Alison Holloway mentions just such an update in her latest blog post.

Chris Jones and I have just released an updated version of the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual on OTN. We've numbered it as 1.2.1, and it has some bug fixes, and some extra information on Oracle SQL Developer.

If you have comments or corrections you'd like to submit on this new updated version, you can post a comment here.

Through the Carson Workshops group, there's a new two day event covering "Professional PHP Programming" happening at The Energy Clinic in London.

This practical, hands-on workshop is aimed at helping PHP and other language developers create fully-fledged, enterprise-level PHP applications that are smart, sophisticated, fast, secure and maintainable.

Combining traditional techniques and future technologies, Nick (Nettleton) will take you through the whole process of creating a full-scale enterprise publishing application, from planning and prototypes through coding, and on to debugging and deployment - all using live, hands-on examples.

The workshop is August 24th and 25th and lasts from 9am to 5:30pm each day. Day one will focus on application development and get attendees started on their own development and will include talk of MVC-style architecture, Web 2.0, and web services.

Day two will get more advanced, covering security issues, interactivity in applications, and building charts/reporting metrics. Performance and scalability will also be covered.

For compelte information on the conference - the whats, whys, whos, and wheres - check out this site and register today to reserve your spot.

DevShed continues their look at the Observer pattern in PHP with this new tutorial, part two in the series - developing a form validation system with the Observer pattern.

Well, after refreshing some of the most important points regarding the creation of observer objects, let's focus our attention on the subject of this second tutorial. Over the next few lines, I'll be demonstrating how to apply the Observer pattern during the development of a real-world application: a form validation system.

They start with the creation of the validation classes for the different data formats. They follow it with the creation of a few more, a bit more abstract classes for validation. Finally, they tie it all in, using the Observer pattern to integrate the form data inputted and the routines to check their values.

Paul Jones has this new post on his blog about the release of two new versions of Solar (back to back) - versions 0.21 and 0.22.

I released Solar 0.21.0 yesterday, and a quick followup 0.22.0 today. The rest of this entry covers highlights for changes in both versions. The main highlights are three new classes (Solar_Struct, Solar_Sql_Row, and Solar_Sql_Rowset) along with a backwards-compatibility break to how classes store their default configuration values.

He lists out the updates, describing the changes that were made to things such as the $_config system, Solar_Sql_Row, and User-Defined Row Classes. There are also some interesting additional comments on the release.

On php|architect's A/R/T article repository today, there's this new tutorial centered around the use of the "magic" method __set_state in PHP5.

It is fairly self-evident how to use most of the magic methods of PHP 5. However, it is not quite so apparent how to use the __set_state method introduced in PHP 5.1. In this article, Peter lavin delves into this elusive magic method to show you how to use this gem in some really 'classy' object oriented PHP.

The author (Peter Lavin) talks first about what magic methods are and, specifically, what the __set_state method can do. He gives an example, comparing a normal usage of var_export to functionality using __set_state.

As is mentioned in this new post from Tobias Schlitt, the eZ systems folks are working toward something called "eZ platform". They've even poublished an article about it to map out their plans.

This article presents an overview of the architecture and development process of the eZ platform, the PHP application platform by eZ systems. The eZ platform will be an Enterprise Open Source software suite based on PHP 6, consisting of a flexible group of expandable building blocks that can be used to create a wide range of powerful enterprise applications for the internet.

This document summarizes the results of meetings and discussions among the core development team at eZ systems during April and May of 2006.

They talk about the goals for the platform, the architecture of it all, their development plan behind it, and the two phases of development:

• Phase I: eZ application server
• Phase II: Functionality plugins

Of course, there will be software requirements for the resulting utility, and they are always happen to get more people involved with the project.