Zend has moved to a closed BETA

Ok guys, it's been a while, but it's finally here. Before or after receiving this letter, each of you would receive a personal letter with a username and password. That's the password to the Zend CVS. We apologize in advance for the slow network performance of this CVS server, it will move to a much quicker link within a few weeks. The purpose of the closed beta period is to test Zend's capabilities of working in more real-world situations, before pounding it in a full public beta. Please read the temporary Zend license that is bundled with libzend, in a file named LICENSE. Right now, a total of about 10 people have been given access to the CVS. About 5 more sponsors will be given access in a couple of days. How to build PHP4: UNIX Recipe: 1. Login to the Zend CVS: cvs -d :pserver:username@cvs.zend.com:/repository login (Logging in to username@cvs.zend.com) CVS password: ******* 2. Checkout the Zend engine: cvs -d :pserver:username@cvs.zend.com:/repository co libzend 3. Login to the PHP4 CVS. Here, you should use your *original* CVS username, the same one you used to login to cvs.php.net until now (and the corresponding password). Check out the PHP4 alpha. cvs -d :pserver:username@newcvs.php.net:/repository login cvs -d :pserver:username@newcvs.php.net:/repository co php4 4. Enter the PHP4 directory. Create a symbolic link from the libzend path to php4/libzend. 5. Enter libzend/, configure it and run make: autoconf ./configure --enable-debug make 6. Enter php4/, configure it and run make: autoconf ./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql make (It may fail in the regex compilation - simply rerun make and it should go through) 7. Run ./php Windows Recipe: 1. Perform steps 1 through 4 above. Check out php4 in C:\Projects\php4 and libzend in C:\Projects\libzend. 2. Get bindlib from http://www.php.net/extra/bindlib-win32.zip . Open it into C:\Projects\php4. 3. Open php4.dsw 4. Hit F7 --- Random points and release notes: * The Apache module works fine. * I guess you already have, but if you haven't yet - go to http://www.zend.com and hit the New Features button. There's also a text list in libzend/ZEND_CHANGES. * Most internal functions don't require any change in implementation to work properly under php4. There's one main exception - functions that directly access array/object elements in return values or arguments. The reason is that the implementation of symbol tables in Zend has changed to take advantage of reference counting, which changed their format. Take a look at one of the array functions in basic_functions.c to understand the nature of this change. Functions that returned array values using PHP's standard API functions will work without further changes. * An implementation of standardized php3.ini variables is half implemented in the php4 tree. I'll put more work to it when I get some free time. * We'll release a couple of patches to bump up thread safety so that it works again in the weekend. We'll also release our implementation of the thread safe resource manager then. * I've opened a new mailing list, beta@zend.com, and all of the closed beta members are on it. CVS updates don't get there yet, we'll try to fix that in the next few days. * We've removed the doc/ directory from the PHP tree. It will generate a couple of warnings in configure, which can be safely ignored. I think we should move the docs to a different tree anyway. * We've also removed the extra/ directory from the tree, which will also generate warnings. * Due to the nature of the new implementation, if you run PHP from the command line with no arguments, it no longer interactively executes your code as you type it. To explicitly enable interactive mode, run php -a. That's all I can think of right now. Enjoy! Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/ For a PGP public key, finger bourbon@netvision.net.il