Web/2 and PHP5

[Jean-Yves]

Firstly, hello everyone.  I've been following these forums for years (I believe that I may have had another login at some point in the dim and distant past but I've no idea whether I posted or not)

I used to be a major OS/2 and eCS fan until the delights of OS X drew me away. (Sorry! )

I recently got a major nostalgia rush and decided to install eCS (1.2MR) on an old Dell laptop. Well, eCS installed but I could not get networking to work at all so I had to abandon that. I have however managed to install it onto VirtualBox and all is working nicely.

Now, I'd like to get Web/2 (WEB2BETA4 file from hobbes) and PHP (php5.exe CGI version from Paul Smedley's site) working together

I know that this should work - others seem to have succeeded and I remember that the last time I had eCS installed I had the same setup working (with PHP4 at the time)

I have copied the php.exe file into the cgi-bin folder and written a very basic test file, phpinfo.php that I have popped into the html folder:

Code: [Select]

<?php
   phpinfo();
However, when I open the file in either Netscape or Mozilla (I have not got around to getting Firefox installed - that's another story! ) nothing happens: Mozilla reloads the current page (directory listing) immediately, whilst Netscape states that there was an empty response.

When I place Web/2's sample cgi examples into the two folders, these work fine.

Anyone got any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for any help

[Sergey Posokhov]

You should use php-cgi.exe instead of php.exe,
You should place PHP.ini to "C:\MPTN\ETC" (see ETC=... variable in Config.sys),
There were some bugs with image loading (Web/2 and PHP5 should be situated on the same drive as your project),
Add error handler and time zone function call (see examples),
Don't forget to check "short_open_tag" option in PHP.ini,
Increase "output_buffering" to 256K...

...or switch to Scala, Erlang, C+=2011, Modula-2 or other serious programming language. There is no salary around PHP.

[Jean-Yves]

Hi there,

Many thanks for the pointers - I'll try you tips out tonight

As for using one of those other languages, none of the ones you mention are really ideal for web development from a portability perspective I'd say. For example, I don't know of Apache or nginx modules for erlang or scala, but I could be wrong as I've never even considered looking for them!

I like PHP though: I've built enterprise systems in it used by both the UK government and various EU bodies, numerous large corporates, my own online game etc, so I reckon it can stand the test   Yeah it's riddled with inconsistencies and has gotchas at every turn for the unwary, but it's perfectly usable if you know what you're doing (been using it almost daily for I think over 10 years now)

Erlang and Scala I don't really know well at all (although I am currently reading a book designed for OO developers to get the hang a functional programming) and I've never used Modula2 although I did use Pascal quite a bit in the very distant past (I even got 100% in my pascal exams. The one and only time I ever scored 100% in a formal exam )

I did look at erlang a little when I was doing some work on a Riak NoSQL storage layer for a system a few months back. Brain hurt!!!  Riak itself was easy enough to set up and interact with via its APIs though.

Smalltalk was the language I loved most - I used to build banking programs in Digitalk Visual Smalltalk for OS/2 a long time ago.

(Edit: fixed some typos)

[Jean-Yves]

No luck. I even removed web/2 and reinstalled it, then I copied the php.exe from the PHP 5.2 archive and tried that, then copied the php_cgi.exe (which is what I meant by the php.exe before, I got the name wrong, sorry) from PHP5.5 and tried that, having amended the cgi config file and restarted web/2

Bizarre.

I'll probably have to go down the Apache route ans see whether that works. 

[Sergey Posokhov]

I have copied the php.exe file into the cgi-bin folder...

I used to leave it into "C:\Programs\PHP5\CGI", then edit PATH and LIBPATH in Config.sys, then edit Web/2 config file.
PHP's own config file, PHP.ini, should be situated in "ETC" directory.

[Jean-Yves]

OK, I'll try that.

Many thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to help out.