paulruizendaal wrote:

>>As a PHP tyro, does this mean that we will eventually see both
>>php_firebird.dll and fbclient.dll being distributed, either with or
>>without the official PHP distro, in the near future?
>
> As I understand from Lester, what is 'official' PHP is a bit up in
> the air right now.

The driver supplied with PHP5 is stable and much more feature rich than
PHP4 - which was frozen some time ago. If you want full Firebird support
you use PHP5 .full stop. ;)

> Yes, it is my intention to create such a dll, time permitting. So far
> I have not bothered to get in touch with the php_interbase
> maintainers, perhaps I should. On the other hand, I think people
> appreciate it more when you come to the table with working code --
> otherwise I just sound like I want potentially irrelevant work done
> for free.

If you are not using the PHP code base then we need to know just what
functions are available. And if you want me to run any compatibility
tests the I need something not bundled - that can be run with PHP5!
Having to use the Apache2 installer is bad enough and get ssh security
running :)

>>Sooner or later, I feel this will have to happen, especially as the
>>two products diverge. It would be nice (imo) to see it happen
>>sooner, so that FB has official support and is not treated as just
>>a derivative of IB.
>
> Agree, that is a pain in my eye too. Also, with Vulcan-stuff and wire-
> protocol enhancements around the corner, we better get through this
> hassle sooner than later.

Ard is the official maintainer and has done all the work on the PHP5
builds. He needed to maintain compatibility with Interbase because of (I
believe) paying customers, but we could not provide any good reason to
split things even with version 1.5. All the PHP manuals show
Firebird/Interbase and my own ADOdb driver is Firebird specific and you
don't see the underlying functions, so php_interbase.dll is not a
problem - at present.

If I spend any time on a new PHP driver it will be testing ADOdbLite but
when your driver is ready to go with PHP5 I'll happily have a look but
it must be on my own Apache2/PHP5 standard setup which is running on a
large number of sites :)

--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services