I'm in the middle of a project that I can't test, so before I get too terribly entrenched in programming everything a certain way, I want to know if anyone is aware of compatibility issues I need to keep an eye out for.
These are the things I've been given, and can't be changed:
- A Windows XP machine (for now; they promise we'll upgrade to Windows 7 "soon") running MS SQL Server 2008
- A Raspberry Pi on the same network as the aforementioned computer, hooked up to a monitor
My task is to build a web page that will display realtime information based on the contents of the database. The best way I've come up with to do this is to make a web page using PHP that uses SQL statements to analyze the data in the database, format it so it makes sense, and then display it in a relatively minimalistic format. I never got a good answer about what browser it'll be displayed in, but I know they're leaving some newer build of Debian on the Pi, so I'm assuming it'll end up being something Chromium-based.
I've downloaded MS SQL Server, XAMPP, and the Microsoft SQL Server PHP drivers (not the MSSQL drivers that come with PHP). I've managed to make something that's successfully pulling information off the server and updating it as necessary, but I'm starting to worry about the drivers, and any other configuration that might have to take place. Should I be considering just scrapping the Microsoft functions and trying to make it work with the usual MSSQL stuff instead, or building something with PDO? Is there anything special about running in a linux environment I should be aware of? I won't really get the chance to test this on anything other than my windows laptop until "go time," so I want to be as prepared as possible. I'd appreciate advice from anybody with any experience in this sort of project
(...) but I know they're leaving some newer build of Debian on the Pi, so
I'm assuming it'll end up being something Chromium-based.
Regarding the browser, make sure your website is as light as possible (try not to use too much Javascript). Due to the device's limitations, browsing is rather slow, even with Midori (the default browser currently being shipped in the latest versions of Raspbian). You can install chromium but it'll be even slower.
As for the server, I agree with Michael Berkowski, go with PDO.
Related
I have read that Microsoft will not be supporting PHP as of PHP8. The entire meaning is quite ambiguous. What I really wanted to know is that will PHP8 not work at all on Windows? Hence rendering all the WAMP server applications useless and hence one would need to switch Linux or Mac for all future development work?
There are two different things here:
The PHP source code needs to support running under Windows, since it doesn't present the same APIs as Linux
Somebody needs to compile each new version of that source code and make the resulting executable available, since few people are willing or able to compile their own copy from source
Point 1 is always a collaboration of everyone working on the open source project. Microsoft may have paid people with knowledge of the Windows platform to contribute, but there's no immediate risk of the PHP project running out of volunteers to make it work there.
Point 2 is the main thing that the project was previously relying on Microsoft for: they provided servers and staff to make sure there were up to date builds ready to download on https://windows.php.net (By comparison, Linux builds will generally be compiled and made available by distributions like Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora.) This is a slightly harder role to replace - for one thing, servers cost money! - but it's by no means impossible.
The bottom line is that running PHP on Windows is common enough that it's very unlikely the project would decide to abandon the platform altogether, and it would almost certainly run there even if Microsoft had never provided any direct support.
I am an extremely under-experienced web developer who is attempting to create a website with a couple friends. The front end stuff is all taken care of and I have been assigned to handle the back end stuff. My background is Materials Engineering, so needless to say, my programming experience relative to back end web development is non-existent. The questions I am going to ask will likely be trivial, and might not make sense at all!
I am just going to try and gain any understanding of the dynamics between MySQL, MAMP, and Eclipse.
If I use the tools provided by MAMP (phpMyAdmin) to create databases, do I then have to incorporate code into our front end code to get it to talk to the databases?
Is MySQLWorkbench a viable option to create the databases? If it is, and I create the databases and extract the code for the databases, where would this code go?
I guess I am just trying to obtain general knowledge on how to create and incorporate databases with MAMP and eclipse, when using MySQL as a database. Again, I understand this is probably trivial, so I would appreciate any information that can be provided!
Thank you.
Firstly, eclipse is simply an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), rather it is a tool that can be used to help develop your code, make sure that you are following proper syntax, etc. It is not however, a replacement for knowing a programming language.
That said, MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, & PHP) is an application stack. Macintosh being the operating system, Apache being the web server that serves up your web pages, PHP being the back end programming language that (potentially) compiles the pages that Apache Servers, and MySQL being the database from which PHP pulls the data from.
As far as creating your databases, PhpMyAdmin and MySQL Workbench are both tools for helping you accomplish the task of creating your databases, tables, and potentially inserting data into these tables. However, as mentioned above you will need to use PHP or some other language, to connect to these databases and pull the information. I highly recommend checking out the PHP MySQLi and PDO MySQL libraries.
I find myself in a situation that someone else must have got stuck in at some point.
Our company runs an in house MSSQL based database, our website then sits on an external server and currently runs MySQL. The problem comes that both databases need to communicate with each other increasingly often.
Our current solution involves SSIS packages but they are tempromental and often slow. We end up very often having to drop tables on our live production server before then rebuilding them from the in house server. Of course this is leading to data inconsistencies so we try and perform these operations outside of peak hours. However, this leads to 24hr delays in some data being transferred from MySQL to MSSQL and then an additional 24hr delay in getting it back to MySQL. None of this is ideal.
What I am looking for is a solution that will allow replication between our in-house MSSQL server and any database that can sit upon a linux box and play nicely with PHP. As I said, we currently run MySQL so we have a preference to any solution that would include that but all other suggestions would be greatfully received.
I've read somewhere that PostgreSQL is a vialbe solution but I am now struggling to find where I read that. I've come accross a few tools that might help such as DBMoto and Slony-I, does anyone have any experience of either in such a situation?
Alternatively, are we simply barking up the wrong tree altogether and should we be trying to integrate MSSQL into our PHP environment?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be gratefully recieved.
Many thanks
Rob
The best solution that i know and i have used for this kind of job is SymmetricDS .
SymmetricDS is an asynchronous data replication software package that
supports multiple subscribers and bi-directional synchronization.
You can access MSSQL servers from PHP using FreeTDS and the mssql_* family of functions (or classes built thereon, or alternative freetds-using extensions). We use this for our admin application, with a Linux/PHP website talking to a MSSQL database.
I have an existing CakePHP that runs on a LAMP environment and need to install it on a USB drive for mass public distribution.
There are a few requirements:
Protect the source code
No installation required
Windows support essential
MAC & Linux would be a bonus
Must run offline, without Internet connection
Ability to sync with server for data transfer and updates
I have conducted a large amount of research into the options and am keen to learn what other developers think.
Potential solutions:
- Flash / XML
- Adobe AIR app
- USB webserver (Server2Go, Portable Apps XAMPP)
Has anyone used any of the above, any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Similar thread here :
Portable USB Webserver
If you ask me, XAMPP should do, because it offers a "plain unzip" version. There's lots of variety out there - Bitnami also offers a nice bunch of stacks, although they may not be good for this particular task.
To keep the same scripts in both Windows and Linux, you could consider using UnxUtils which is a port of all common Linux commands. This will be very handy if you are good at Linux bash shell scripting but not good at Windows batch files.
Protecting the source code is a bit troublesome. Do you really, really need to do so? Because there's a ton of great open source code out there which already does practically everything in most common business domains - sourceforge.net.
And if someone's taking your code and calling it their own, you can just name them on the internet if you can prove it. That itself will be bad publicity for them. That said, I obviously don't know your specific need. So that is just my opinion.
You will have problems with this, no matter how you go about it. Each step is a little more unusual it seems.
You'll need to use a source code obfuscator to protect your source. I recommend the one by Zend, not from experience, but because Zend makes awesome products. Never used a source protector myself.
You'll need three custom LAMP/MAMP/XAMP installs, one for each target OS. They should point to a directory that is shared on the USB drive. Make sure you configure them to use an unprotected port, otherwise the user will need admin privileges to run the server software. And getting the server stuff up and running will likely result in a few hiccups as well.
I would actually recommend finding something that will allow you to distribute a binary, or something like an AIR app that is intended for this type of distribution. You may have to rewrite lots of code, but it'll be easier to fix than all the niggling little install errors you'll see on the client end. To package scripts into binaries without rewriting stuff, check out http://www.scriptol.com/apollo.php and similar products.
But I'd suggest you make a standalone app in adobe air that will sync with your server (maybe even some google gears integration, to have it function offline). Don't try to force a PHP app into this distribution model, it'll create nightmarish problems.
This is what I used to run a CakePHP app from a DVD. Worked on USB too (while I was still developing it).
http://www.server2go-web.de/
Server2Go is a Webserver that runs out of the box without any installation and on write protected media. This means that web applications based on Server2Go can be used directly from cdrom, a usb stick or from any folder on a hard disk without the hassle of configuring Apache, PHP or MySQL.
Server2Go allows you to create a standalone working web site or PHP application on a CD-ROM.
It's really nice.
You can use MAMP for Mac, you'll just need to edit the config to properly point the sites directory.
however you would have the problem that the mysql db would not necessarily work with windows. if you switched the db to sqlite, you could sync the sqlite db file fairly easily.
XAMPP would work for the windows side
sorry dont know about the linux side.
Out there is a CakePHP InstaWeb Server
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/the-cakephp-instaweb-webserver
that runs on python and doesn't need an installation. This plus some additional goodies should get you already half the way.
I've got an upcoming project wherein I will need to connect our website (PHP5/Apache 1.3/OpenBSD 4.1) to our back-end system running on an iSeries with OS400 V5R3 so that I can access some tables stored there. I've done some checking around but am running into some roadblocks.
From what I've seen the DB2 extensions and DB2 software from IBM only run under Linux. I've tried compiling the extensions with all the software from IBM and even tried their precompiled ibm_db2 extension with no luck. IBM only supports Linux so I turned on the Linux emulation in the kernel but that didn't seem to help anything.
If anyone has run across getting everything to run natively under OpenBSD that would be great, but what I think I may have to do is setting up a second server running CentOS with DB2 installed (most likely via ZendCore for IBM since it seems to do all this for me) and the driver so that I can set up a small transaction server that I can post against and get a JSON representation of the DB2 data that I need.
Does the second option seem overkill or does anyone else have any better ideas?
Have you looked at connecting to the server using unixODBC? If I remember correctly it has support for IBM DB2 and compiles on OpenBSD. Check out http://www.php.net/odbc for more information regarding the PHP side.
If you can't get that to work, the option to setup a web service on a Linux server may be all you can do.
Rather than setup a 2nd box, why don't you look into the PHP Connector for iSeries? My mainframe guys said it was very easy to setup on our iSeries here.
We wrote a simple server in PHP that loads data models from DB2 data, serializes them, and returns them to the caller. This approach means that only another PHP app can consume the service but it's just so much quicker on both ends to just serialize the object and send it down the pipe.
Here is a PDF from IBM on the subject: http://i-seriesusergroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/PHP%20for%20i5OS%20NESDND.pdf
To second #John Downey, I've gotten connectivity to work with PHP on an AS/400 with unixODBC.
Check your phpinfo() to see if unixODBC is available in it. I didn't have to compile it in on SLES 10.
Looks like a web service is going to be the answer for me. On a production box I'd rather not have to go through compiling and maintaining my own special installation of PHP since ODBC support needs to be compiled in, according to the PHP documentation.
A web service is almost certainly the way to go. I'm sure you've already thought of this, but since you're doing PHP on both sides, you can shortcut things a little bit by using serialize() to build your response data instead of building a proper XML document. It's less flexible over the long run, but it will probably get you up and running more quickly.
Indeed, a webservice seems like a great way to solve the problem. One way to avoid having a completely separate OS for it would be to write the webservice in Java on top of the AS400 tools for Java (which are quite nice, btw). That should at least let you run your service layer on the OpenBSD box as well.
You can connect directly using a standard ODBC driver as well. The IBM version usually gives you more features like being able to call programs and things like that. If you only need SQL and stored procedures, ODBC should work.
Why not use PDO from PHP? I have to guess here since I could not find a public list of all ports available for OpenBSD, but since there is a port for FreeBSD, NetBSD etc. maybe you get lucky as well.
(I guess that even though OpenBSD links to FreeBSD's porter's handbook, Freshports is not applicable for your system?)
If PDO is not available and since I am hoping you use ports and according to the following link there is php5-ODBC available:
http://www.openbsd.org/pkg-stable40.html
So assuming you manage your system through ports, there are your pointers.
Hope that helps!