Paul Skinner

This sort of thing drives me bonkers:

PHP:  instanceof operator

The instanceof operator was introduced in PHP 5. Before this time is_a() was used but is_a() has since been deprecated in favor of instanceof. Note that as of PHP 5.3.0, is_a() is no longer deprecated.

See also get_class() and is_a().

To deprecate or not to deprecate?  Why depricate a function that is very useful is the question I suppose.

I assume this is back in full effect in PHP 5.3.  Thank god.

Rock Out with PHP on Windows! (Track 3)
Today’s application developers have an incredible variety of technologies that allow them to create rocking web solutions. While that variety provides choice which is a very powerful tool in of itself, the complexities that arise from choice make it difficult to pick the right technology to implement a web solution. PHP is one of the most popular technologies to implement web applications. Up until recently, Windows was not a good platform choice for hosting PHP web applications for a variety of reasons. With the advent of the FastCGI component for IIS7 and PHP development tools by Microsoft, Windows has become a veritable stage for PHP developers to build applications that “go to eleven”.

Join us in the PHP on Windows track for a rocking series of sessions that will provide you with an overview of the benefits the Windows Server 2008 platform for PHP solutions, how to build PHP web applications on Windows and how to build user interfaces for PHP applications that pop using Microsoft developer and designer tools.

I am standing here beside myself.

Microsoft has actually acknowledged PHP?!? See Technical Tracks here for more info.

- P

P.S. This whole thing smacks as though Ballmer himself “rocked” his P.R. prowess all over it.

Looking over the referrer stats, it seems that many people reach this blog through Google searches more or less aligned with “How do I install PHP on IIS?”. I think XAMPP might be a better, and easier answer for many about to embark on a frustrating journey.

I can appreciate the need to install PHP under IIS for some purposes. For instance you need your application to co-exist in an environment where you are subject to the existing infrastructure, ranging to the more rudimentary “It’s what the client wants” concerns.

For the most part, I think we can all agree that few, if any visitors to this page would actually be building a web server to be deploy in a data-centre for production/mission critical purposes. I’d hazard that the vast majority of these visits are more interested in learning about PHP, dealing with configuration mysteries or just want a sane development environment in which to code, debug and test.

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I’m going to cheap out and review FC8 in a VM as I don’t have a partition to dedicate to a full-on hardware installation (I’ll pay for this choice a bit later) at the moment.

FC8 was downloaded directly from the fedoraproject.org site in ISO DVD format.

The first part of this post discusses some pains in getting Virtual PC to play nice with FC8… scroll ahead if you don’t care about installing under Virtual PC…

A previously installed copy of Microsoft Virtual 2007 will be used to host the FC8 install. The VM will be allocated 512MB of RAM and a 32GB virtual drive. The host OS is Windows XP on an Intel E6600 with 3GB of RAM.

Right off the bat, the graphical installation seems to be out of the question. Once beyond the bootloader, the generic framebuffer doesn’t seem to be handled well by Virtual PC 2007 but I’m sure this is fine on real hardware (in hindsight, this probably isn’t true, if you specify the kernel parameters described below during the installer’s kernel boot, the graphical install should work just fine).

The text installer software is the ever familiar Anaconda installer, where the 32GB virtual disk was partitioned and formatted using defaults most of the way along. The “Office and Productivity”, “Software Development” and “Web Server” collections were selected for installation.

The installer chugged through and completed in fairly short order.

The VM was rebooted and then things got interesting.

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I purport no expertise in web-marketing particularly because I find the concept abstract and a voodoo/pseudo-science of sorts. From my perspective, it’s in the same realm as astrology. Both make for interesting stories. What works here may not work there… for reasons that usually escape me completely. It’s all very emotional which by nature makes it unpredictable and subject to interpretation.

Some of my experience has been applying web marketing concepts that others have developed. I’ll avoid the delving into the various requirements and solutions as they’ve varied over the years, and aren’t really the point of this but rather all centre around spending money in some form or another to get the right traffic to your site to eventually sell something to someone.

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One of my first blog posts, PHP Installation: A myriad of options asserted that Windows and PHP 4 in ISAPI mode was a frustrating affair. I hereby offer a partial retraction in this regard as PHP 5 is MUCH different.

The folks at PHP recently announced the retirement of the 4.x version slated for December 2007. After which PHP 4 will continue to receive critical updates until August 2008. If you still run PHP 4, now is the time to starting thinking about getting everything up to version 5.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to upgrade all our development environments to PHP 5. Our standard development machines aren’t really all that fancy; 2 year old Dell P4 H/T based desktops running XP. Being a small group of developers, we’re liberal with the choice of IDE; some use PHPEdit, while I’m drawn between Zend IDE and Eclipse.

Our previous run-ins with PHP4 in ISAPI mode were not good. While PHP would usually run to some extent, we were often faced with segfault error message at the top of the output and often IIS would space out. Yes, we’d followed the lengthy install read-me on the site and still could not get PHP and IIS to play nicely. We pretty much gave up on PHP in ISAPI under IIS and settled with PHP in CGI mode for development purposes.

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Earlier this week I ran into an issue with Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) after upgrading to the latest version (Europa 3.?). My development platform is Windows XP and IIS, 3.2 P4 1GB RAM, IIS, PHP 5 ISAPI, MySQL. We call this the WIMP configuration (Windows IIS MySQl PHP) .

Some of the scripts in our application are quite large and something happened with the PDT; it simply takes forever for Eclipse to parse the script and extract all the classes/variables to render the Outline perspective. This gets really frustrating as it goes through this process on regular intervals as you work through the script. I can’t really complain about Eclipse up until now, its been my development workhorse for the past while and will eventually get fixed in this regard. I have faith. What do you want for free after all?

This lead me down a path where I uncovered things I’d rather not know or have experienced…

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I suppose that a site that discusses PHP and Linux affairs should probably have some sort of documentation or links to reasonable how-tos on the subject. However, the thought of detailing a PHP/Apache/MySQL installation doesn’t appeal to me much either, so I’ll take a different slice on this. Rather than regurgitating the same steps as every other PHP How-To, I’ll talk about some configuration choices based on the machine’s role.

Alright then, you want to install PHP on your PC or “server” type machine. I’d hazard that you’re either already running Linux or have the misfortune of running Windows. While PHP runs on just about on hardware and OS combo, the Unix flavours perform better and seem to be more stable, not to mention there is less voodoo involved in making it work right.

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