junkers109 wrote:

> I read somewhere (probably on this forum) that interbase support was excluded for PHP v. 5.3 because of new requirements for extensions. These include requirements for compilation using VC6 or VC9, depending on whether its the threaded or non-threaded version etc. Any extensions not going through this cycle were excluded in the 5.3 release. As I understand it, when the php_interbase.dll goes through this process, it will be included in later releases. The advice is that you stick with v. 5.2.11 for the time being - it's the latest version with interbase support.
>
> I don't know about PDO and DBx dependencies, but ADODb definitely needs the interbase extension to work.
>
> --- In firebird-php@yahoogroups.com, Roberto Carlos <rc.1990@...> wrote:
>> From PHP 5.3 on, it feels like php_interbase.dll will not be officialy supported anymore.
>> As a matter of fact, it is not even downloadable from cvs on PHP 5.3. But it used to be in 5.2 and before.
>> In this case, what technology should we use for new projects integrating PHP and Firebird?
>> ADOdb, PDO, DBx, etc?
>> Why?

There is a long story here, which I'll not go into, but there is NOTHING
wrong with Firebird in PHP5.3, and all of the Linux distributions simply
work. The problem with windows builds has more to do with the problems
that WINDOWS creates than anything to do with Interbase/Firebird and a
number of other extensions that have also lost their packages :(

There are private builds of php_interbase.dll available which ignore the
'rules' that now apply to PHP5.3 windows builds, but personally I'm
still staying with PHP5.2 in production.

The RULE for PHP5.3 windows builds is that every library must be built
with the same windows compiler as that build of PHP, so the official
build for Apache/PHP uses 'VC6' and so requires that Firebird library is
also compiled with VC6 - something that personally I would never do.
They ALSO require a VC9 build for use with IIS ... but the official
Firebird builds are VC8. There has been no problem using the official
builds with PHP52 - nothing internally has changed to cause problems -
and the private builds of php_interbase.dll work fine with PHP5.3 - they
just will not be distributed by the 'php windows' project :(

PDO is another matter and one that IS currently under discussion. The
current situation is that while the pdo_firebird extension is
functional, because of the way data is 'abstracted' we can't simply use
text blob fields as character strings. So many of the ADOdb type
operations fail when routed through PDO. There are other areas which
cause problems as well, but until such time as we can actually use even
the DATA abstraction, there is little incentive to spend time working on
the pdo_firebird driver. We need the generic driver for services and
other facilities anyway! And ADOdb works well when you need cross
database operation - PDO simply ignores that area altogether.

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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