Kevin van Zonneveld has passed along a note about one of his latest posts to his blog, this overview of how virtualization on the desktop can help you make stronger, improved code.

If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. [...] If there's one thing I've really learned, it's invest in a good testing environment.

Another trick to improve the speed &quality of development, is to virtualize your production platform to your local workstation. The fake-production server (virtual machine) will mount your code directory directly as it's webroot, and so it can serve your IDE-work instantly.

He uses the VirtualBox software to create the virtual environment (Ubuntu on Ubuntu in this case) and gives the complete steps to setting it all up:

• Download Operating System for Virtual Machine
• Creating/Configuring a new Virtual Machine
• Installing the OS
• Upgrade/Updating to the most recent software versions
• Making it a server
• Testing the Environment

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a recording (from the Zend/PHP Conference &Expo 2008) of the UnConference session user group panel discussion.

Ben Ramsey, Software Architect at Schematic and PHP community leader, and Keith Casey, founder of CaseySoftware, held an UnCon session at ZendCon this year to discuss PHP User Groups.

You can either listen to it on the page or you can always grab the mp3 and listen at your leisure.

In a new post today Stuart Herbert asks the question "is it possible to secure a shared server with PHP and FastCGI installed on it?" His answer follows...

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. PHP has built-in features to help, but ultimately it's the wrong place to address the problem. [...] Before we can look at performance, the first question is: how exactly do we get PHP and FastCGI running as different users on the one web server in the first place?

He follows through on this, giving a little mini-tutorial on getting the environment installed on an Apache web server. He includes some benchmarks on the difference between using the Apache 1.3.x series and Apache 2 (generated using the ab benchmarking tool).

Jani Hartikainen has put together a handy script for those out there that like what the Zend Framework is all about but don't really need the whole thing to get the job done. If that's you, this script might be just what you need.

Did you ever want to use just a single component from Zend Framework, but couldn't figure out which files you needed? Well, here's a solution: Zend Framework packageizer script! Just pick the class you want, and you'll get it and all its dependencies in a nice zip file for you to consume.

The packager uses the tokenizer functionality PHP offers natively to look through the files for the package you're after and finds all of the files that might need to be included and pulls them right along into the zip file.

In response to this tutorial over on the PHPro.org website a new post has been made to the PHP in Action blog with an "even cooler" way to do the same sort of DOM fetching - XPath.

I'm a little bit surprised at the claim [the tutorial makes] that it's the "correct" (only) way, since there's at least one more that I find even cooler: XPath. Admittedly, it's slower, yet it's a more powerful language.

A quick example is included, building up from a simple search for anchor tags up to a custom query looking for just the anchor tags with a class of "bookmark".