SonicChicken blog

Recently I’ve had one of my student assistants working on setting up a web server. She’s pretty much got it, except that she hasn’t been able to establish a connection from the web server to our database server.

We’re wanting to use ADODB to connect to a mssql server. She figured out how to install the databases/adodb5 port (and how to get ADODB included in the PHP configuration), but that wasn’t enough by itself. I thought there might be a PHP extension required, and a little Unix pipe revealed the missing module:

# grep -i ^php /usr/ports/INDEX-7 | grep -v ^php4 | grep -i adodb

The command above searches the ports index for lines starting with “php” (or “PHP”), ignores those which begin with “php4″ (I’m not interested in version 4 stuff), and searches everything that’s matched so far for “adodb” (or “ADODB”). Results:

php-adodb-ext... (long index line snipped)

A quick check of /var/db/pkg verified that this module hadn’t been installed yet. I installed the module via portmaster(8) and added the new extension per the pkg-message instructions:

# portmaster databases/php-adodb-ext
.
.
.
(installation stuff snipped)
# cat >>/usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini
extension=adodb.so

Now we’re getting a different error:

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function mssql_get_last_message() in /usr/local/share/adodb/drivers/adodb-mssql.inc.php on line 501

Google indicates the problem is likely that the mssql extension for PHP isn’t installed. I ran the same pipe that I did for ADODB, this time searching for mssql:

# grep -i ^php /usr/ports/INDEX-7 | grep -v ^php4 | grep -i adodb

php5-mssql... (long index line snipped)

So another portmaster(8) installation, this time for php5-mssql. One of php5-mssql’s dependencies is freetds-msdblib, which has some configuration options. The only one I’m setting is MSDBLIB, which enables MS SQLserver (in lieu of the old Sybase DB).

This port (php5-mssql) automatically registers itself as a PHP extension, so you don’t have to add a line to /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini yourself.

I’m still getting errors, but they’re starting to look like problems with the database connection string instead of server configuration now. Progress, of a sort. But that’s enough for now–It’s almost 8:00 pm on Friday night before a 3-day weekend, long past time for me to get on with my own life!

While working on an earlier post, I needed to find a way to display a PHP module on a web page without having it executed. I knew this was fairly simple and involved the .phps file extension, but I hadn’t done it before. A quick search of the PHP site pointed me to the highlight_file function. About halfway down the page there is a blurb about the MIME type that I needed. It turns out that my web hosting service already has this enabled, so all I needed to do was get a .phps extension on my file. I did it the easy way, with a softlink:

ln -s myfile.php myfile.phps

For those who don’t know Unix, this effectively creates another name for the same file, which is exactly what I want. This leaves the original .php alone, so that it can be run by the web server. But is also allows me to post the code on the web, using the .phps “file” which the web server will display instead of executing. The elegance of this solution is that if/when I modify the original code, I won’t have to make any changes to the displayable code because there is really only one file (with two distinct names).

I stumbled across this post from almost exactly one year ago. Joseph, I salute your effort, and the fact that you made this work is very cool, but I think this approach (relatively low-level network programming) may be the wrong track to pursue. I think a more appropriate method would be network API’s for new or existing applications, or at least higher-level libraries.

Network overhead is obviously vastly more “expensive” than local function calls, so you should probably reserve network functions for heavyweight applications. You mentioned databases–I think this is actually a good use of network programming! I have in mind something like the USPS’s ZIP code lookup. There is obviously a database backend on this web app. Granted, one cannot make arbitrary database queries (nor inserts, updates, deletes), but it does serve up the data quickly and competently. The database sits on the same machine (or topologically “close”) to the API server. Google is another example, and smarter people than I will come up with many more already-existing web services with DB backends. I think this is where Internet programming can really shine!