Strength in Unity
Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft Windows
“I’m trying to compile PHP on Windows”
Such a simple statement brought various reactions in IRC channels and mailing lists. But invariably I heard the same thing asked.
“Why?”
No, I’m not insane. And I realize that there are some great resources for downloading precompiled ready to go [...]
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After Pierre’s nice hint after my rant about compile failures (his comment said download this huge file from Edin’s site…)
I downloaded zip.zip (nice descriptive name eh?) from edin’s site. Deleted my current win32build directory – unzipped that monster, took the php_build, dropped it where win32build was and renamed it (hey, took me a long [...]
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For three days I fought with compiling PHP5.2 on windows. The point was to be able to compile PHP-GTK2 a little more often (there are at least two bugfixes in CVS that I need for my writer project) and asking on the list/irc for compiled versions got me some smartass answer about “learn to [...]
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There was an error in go-pear.phar in PHP 5.2 snaps. Greg Beaver fixed it immediately, but the fix was NOT incorporated into the 5.2 releases for windows – however the file for the source releases is correct. If you are getting errors that look like this
Warning: Cannot use a scalar value as an array in
phar://go-pear.phar/PEAR/Command.php on line 268
when installing PEAR please grab the latest version of the go-pear.phar file from cvs . Another option is to use the script from Go-Pear . Save it to your system and run it using the instructions in the comments header and you’ll always have the latest versions of the PEAR package installer.
In response to a lot of griping from the PHP community about a lack of unified cleaning of user supplied data, 5.2 is introducing a new extension included by default, called filter. (It was available for 5.1 through PECL)
The available functions are now in the manual and there is a short tutorial on how to use filter in your code. There were quite a few arguments going on about the right api for the extension on the internals mailing list. We’ll see how the users like it.
One thing that may not seem obvious at first is that filter does two jobs depending on the type of filter you are using – it sanitizes (or literally filters) using any of the filter constants starting with FILTER_SANITIZE and validates using any of the filters that start with FILTER_VALIDATE – why they decided to combine the two is kind of fuzzy but don’t let it confuse you.
You need to understand the difference because validate filters will return false if the validation failed. The sanitize filters will always return a string.
Give it a try and see if you think it’s useful enough to become the standard for variable sanitizing and validating.
Zendcon was held October 30 to November 2 in San Jose, California. Several of our members even attended, but while we’re waiting for their opinions on the experience, here’s a round up of available blog postings and slides from speakers from the conference. Now you do miss a lot of information only looking at the slides, but hopefully you can learn something new.
You can also read some roundups and opinions from people at the conference if you’re interested.
Sounds like everyone had a great time and there’s some interesting information there.
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PHP 5.2 is finally released. If you are using 5.0.x or 5.1.x it is recommended that you upgrade. The number of bugfixes and feature enhancements are kind of staggering.
Here are some highlights:
The bottom line? PHP 5.0.x is really old. PHP 5.1.x is officially obsolete. Upgrading hurts, but an exploited PHP bug would hurt more.
One more item – there is a really nice new windows installer for PHP. It can set up basically every sapi available plus cgi – that means Apache in all its incarnations, IIS, the list goes on. It also allows you to set up additional extensions (the trick is to open the extensions tree on the “Choose Items to Install” page and pick the ones you want…not very intuitive I know) One more caveat? Windows gets so little love that even the link on the downloads page is wrong, and the server is incorrectly sending headers for the msi. Internet Explorer totally ignores this and still downloads it properly. One time when their stupidity comes in handy. But in Firefox you have to open the file in a new tab, immediately head to “save page as” and then close the tab quick before it kills your browser! If you’re a windows user head to the real download the msi and enjoy how easy it is to install PHP on windows
Update: the link issue has been fixed and should propogate to all the mirrors
At the Zend conference this year they have a really cool toy out – the PHP Community deck of cards. I am assuming it is based off of last years cards by Cal Evans – but taken to the next step. This year they have a full deck of cards with various members of the PHP community on them include the 4 Queens – Sara Goleman (spades), Laura Thomson ( hearts), Dhwani Vahia (diamonds) and Joyce Park (clubs).
Unfortunately as far as I know they are only available to conference attendees and those who are featured in the deck. To see the full deck of cards check out here.
