Re: The future of PHP -- accessory libraries

Geoff Caplan said: > I would just like to highlight an issue which I feel has a negative effect > on the acceptance of PHP. > This is the difficulty of finding, downloading, compiling and installing the > various PHP libraries not included in the core distribution. Amen. As a member of a back-to-front web-design firm, we have resorted to hosting many of our customers in-house simply because the ISP that is currently hosting them either refuses to update accessory libraries, refuses us accessibility to update them ourselves, and/or treats the entire idea of their deficient system as incredulous. As a result, we have had certain projects that we had originally budgeted 2 days development and implementation time blow up into 2 month every-other-day negotiation with a hostile ISP complete with phone tag, additional agreement signing, and ultimately domain name transferring (which we should have done in the first place). One thing that I am _shocked_ has fallen by the wayside is payflow pro implementation. Until a short while ago, everyone I spoke with at Verisign tech support about PHP SDK implementation treated PHP like a dirty word and refused to help with it. Messages on php-general were answered by numerous "uh, yeah -- tell me how you do it when you find out" with conflicting answers from those who had an idea on how to get it to work. There are plenty of work-arounds if you're running your own show, but if you are dealing with a semi-hostile ISP, you are in for it. The ISP wouldn't give us info on where the CERTS were stored (because of security issues they said) so we couldn't put an environment variable pointing to them and use an exec() or passthru() to make it work either. And then the SSL conflicts with payflow pro SDK were laughable. How else would you want to use payflow pro except under an SSL environment? Don't get me wrong, I'm a *rabid* supporter of PHP and if not for it I'd certainly not be where I am right now. :-) My $0.02, Dan Harrington > -----Original Message----- > From: Geoff Caplan [mailto:geoff@productivity.co.uk] > Sent: Monday, August 27, 2001 4:26 AM > To: php-general@lists.php.net > Subject: [PHP] Re: The future of PHP > > > Hi folks > > I would just like to highlight an issue which I feel has a negative effect > on the acceptance of PHP. > > This is the difficulty of finding, downloading, compiling and installing the > various PHP libraries not included in the core distribution. Many quite > important libraries seem to be persoanl projects which are not supported by > the core team, and are hosted on sites that can be down for days at a time. > On Linux, many still require a re-compile, there is no documentation > standard, and no central repository. This compares badly with platforms such > as Perl and Java, who tackled this issue long ago. > > My own ISP, who is one of the few to offer all PHP & MySQL upgrades as they > are released, complains about this bitterly. The upshot is that shared > hosting rarely offers more than the core functionality, which can be very > restrictive. Setting up your own server can be daunting and time consuming - > and the commercial distros such as Zend and Nusphere don't seem to have > tackled the library issue either. > > In terms of acceptability in the market, I suspect that this creates a > negative impression. It seems to me that this is a quite central issue if > PHP is to be perceived as a mature platform for building mission critical > systems. I do hope that the development team, and those such as Zend who are > committed to the future of PHP give this some attention. > > Geoff Caplan >