I have been developing applications with PHP for more than 10 years, and every now and then something comes up that looks to be fairly trivial task as first, yet it takes up a considerable amount of time to actually get done because of some of the PHP quirks (or features as you may call it). Here is one of my recent encounter with a piece of code, that I would like you to try out and see how fast you can achieve the desired results.

Compiling PHP 5 on a Windows platform is a messy business. There are lot of pitfalls and annoying problems that make it difficult to compile PHP itself, or a PHP extension on Windows. After recently going through the pain, I decided to create a step by step guide so that it might be useful to other people out there. Using this guide, the latest version of PHP 5(currently 5.4.7) and related extensions can be compiled on Windows 32bit and 64bit platforms (Windows XP, Vista, 7).

Windows 8 Consumer Preview was recently released by Microsoft, and is available free from their website for everyone. After installing and playing with it for a while, I have found the experience pleasing and satisfying enough to crave for the final version. Here is a list of 5 things I liked best about the preview.

Propel is a fast ORM with multiple database support and can be integrated with the Kohana 3.x framework instead of it’s default ORM. Since Propel generates it’s models using command line, some work is involved in integrating it with Kohana 3. Therefore, I created a simple module for Kohana 3 with all the required scripts and stuff.

The neweset version of Firefox browser has improved web developer tools, and one of the coolest tool is the 3D debugging view of the webpage. This functionality was previously available as as addon, but now has been integrated into the browser web developer tools. To activate the tool, Press Ctrl+Shift+I inside any webpage, and then click the ‘3D View’ button at the bottom of the screen.