Getting Started with PHP/Ming

One day, I found a site about
Ming, a SWF output library and PHP
module. Somehow, it attracted me, and gave me a
driving force to try it immediately. I tried to read quickly to
find things I’d be able to download. I downloaded the source
code, the examples, and the precompiled PHP module.
When I don’t have extra time, sometimes I think, “why compile
it myself if someone else has compiled it for me?” Therefore, I
fetched the compressed file, uncompressed it into a server
running Debian GNU/Linux 2.2.

According to the installation howto, what I’d need to do was
just download the PHP module and put the uncompressed
php_ming.so to PHP module directory. PHP module directory?
Where is it? Aha, simply run php-config
--extension-dir. “Piece of cake”, I thought.

The last
step was adding extension=php_ming.so. I tried the
sample code (you’ll find it later in this article) — it didn’t
work. My intuition told me that it might be because I was using
Debian along with the stable packages I apt-got (… err…
apt-get in past tense) install. Well, I was right. So, let’s
discuss about how to do it in Debian.