Apache & PHP

[Adam Sussman <my...@vidya.com>]

Hello,

I am gald to see that you are considering makeing PHP an Apache module.  I have
made quite extensive use of PHP and have submited patches to the current 
voting round that became necessary with its use.

I would be very interested in helping out with the porting of PHP to apache
and its testing.  I now have a vested interest in it :).

I also have a couple of thoughts that you might want to consider.  I use PHP
mainly for database applications.  Unfortunatly, mSQL is not very stable on
my systems(Linux mostly) and it does not have an adequate set of features
to meet my needs.  I have therefore added primitive Postgres95 support to my
copy of PHP.  Its not up to par with the mSQL interface, but it does function
adequatly.  In doing the port it occured to me that a more generic database
interface would be nice, especialy since I will eventualy need to deal with
many different varieties.  It would also make it easier to plug in new
database libraries.  What do you think?

In one of my larger PHP projects, I have made a shopping cart application.
Doing this requires, at the very least, a persistent session identifier.  
This can be done with netscape cookies, but most often, it needs to be done
as a url query string variable.  I currently do this by running a perl program
that parses the output of PHP for links and adds the appropriate session
information.  This is not very good for performance :).  Do you think it 
would be possible to implement this within PHP itself?

Anyway, thank you for this stellar piece of software.  I am looking forward to
its future incarnations.  Please let me know if I can be of any help.

Thank you,

Adam Sussman
Vidya Media Ventures

Re: Apache & PHP

[Mark J Cox <ma...@ukweb.com>]

On Sun, 11 Feb 1996, Adam Sussman wrote:
> I am gald to see that you are considering makeing PHP an Apache module.

We were using PHP some time ago and found it to be great for mSQL
integration.  An Apache PHP module would be a great deal nicer as it would
fix the security issues in allowing arbitary files to be processed by PHP
(*1), hence the entry under Wish List on http://bong.com/httpd/todo

Mark
Mark Cox, Technical Director, UK Web ------------ http://www.ukweb.com/~mark

(*1) You usually use "/cgi-bin/php.cgi/some/file/path/filename.phtml" and
we found putting "/...php.cgi/somescriptname.cgi" will return the source
of a PERL program, "/...php.cgi/protected/filename.html" will return a
file that is in a protected directory and so on. (Using mod_alias only
makes /x/y.phtml redirect to "/cgi-bin/php.cgi/x/y.phtml")