AF Planning Now Public

Wow, looks like it’s gonna be a complicated, large game
Shame it’s in PHP5 though… I don’t think that many hosts support it yet. Or at least, my host doesn’t support it XD

It is my hope, at least, that by the time Astrum Futura is out, most hosts that at least have PHP 5.1.x installed will upgrade to 5.2.x.

It is sort of a catch 22, with hosts not wanting to upgrade because not enough popular applications run on PHP 5. Then developers not wanting to support PHP 5 because not enough hosts support it either.

If Astrum Futura gets popular enough, then someone can install PHP 5.2 as CGI/FastCGI, but this requirement is truthfully harsh in some cases.

The availability of PHP5 was always going to be an issue. The problem we faced was that we wanted a pure OOP application that’s easy to test, modify and maintain in the long run. In the “long run” PHP6 will see a release. If we’re still stuck with PHP4 at that stage we will have an application 2 PHP versions behind the curve. I really feel for folk stuck on PHP4, but I’m confident that by the time AF is ready to be installed as a stable app, users will have more options. Currently even I have to compile PHP5 on my own host as CGI .

Dreamhost has a Wiki Article on tuning PHP for FastCGI. I’ve been trying to find it myself, but haven’t looked hard enough. http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/PHP_FastCGI and see if it helps.

I currently have the PHP5.2 CGI compiled with fast-cgi support – I just haven’t gotten around to adding a FastCGI script for handling requests and setting up the persistent CGI processes. I’m pretty sure from reading the Wiki a while back that Dreamhost has a 2-3 process limit (more and the server gets a bit crazy – although 3 is likely enough).

Also, with FastCGI, the APC opcode cache will actually work . I’ll set it up when we need it – at the moment only the forums might use it well. MediaWiki can’t be used with FastCGI for some reason. I also need to compile a PHP5.2 version without fast cgi support (fcgi messes with the php command line I believe).

Oh… I might take a look on this FastCGI thing
I’ve never coded in PHP5 before, and I really want to try it but all my hosts have never supported PHP4, and they don’t want to install it on the servers.

You should probably look for a host that does. It amazes me that hosts aren’t taking the initiative with upgrading to PHP 5, the RPMs are out there. Maybe not for 5.2, but at least with 5.1.

They’re afraid it will break a lot of older applications which rely on ancient long superglobal names, register globals, and bits of coding that were made defunct with PHP5.0. Stuff none of us likely notice, but which effect older apps.

Of course, this has is a cycle. If hosts don’t support PHP5, than users can’t use PHP5 apps, and so developers remain coding in PHP4 which just hands the hosts (back here again) an excuse not to upgrade. .

For anyone reading, a few hosts do offer both PHP4 and PHP5 which you can switch between for your domains and each subdomain separately. I’m currently using Dreamhost – these guys even let you compile your own PHP version with whatever extensions you want (big plus for me).