The Lair of the Pythia

I’ve steered clear of the debate over CodeGear announcing a new CEO because I don’t see any value in speculation and conspiracy theories. However, Jim Douglas has now started blogging and his first post contains some encouraging comments. I particularly like the fact that he mentions the “first experience”. Buying and installing CodeGear products can be rather depressing, and leave you wondering if the product itself is as bad as the buy/install/register process. This can be unfair, because the guys who write Delphi products are not necessarily the same guys who run the shop. Furthermore, if the shop and registration process are still managed by Borland rather than by CodeGear staff (or by third parties contracted to Borland) then it may need someone at Jim’s level in the company to get things put right. Here’s hoping Jim’s focus on this area bears fruit.

Gabr has wise words to say about enabling range checking.

While I have been busy doing other things, the blogosphere has been discussing the input filter issue with Delphi for PHP. As was mentioned in the comments to my previous post, Brian Layman has mentioned it. There is a longer discussion on Tim Anderson’s blog, which eventually leads to a (partial) solution.

It seems that Apache was telling me the truth. The input filter extension was incorporated in PHP as of v5.2.1. However, Delphi for PHP ships with PHP 5.1.1, and the VCL didn’t know about 5.2.1. A fix has now been released that does not produce the error if PHP 5.2.1 or greater is detected. You can download the new versions of system.inc.php and vcl.inc.php here.

So, now I can use the VCL on the test server in my office without it throwing errors. But I still can’t use it on this site because Pair is currently only running PHP 5.1.1 and I don’t yet know how (or even if I can) install the input filter on this site. One thing is for sure though – there’s no way I’m going to comment out an error trap that would cause a major security breach.

Mike Swindell has a short post today announcing that a Delphi for PHP 14-day trial is now available. This is good news. And if you stick to doing things in the IDE you’ll probably be favorably impressed. Deployment, on the other hand, requires more work. As I mentioned yesterday, there are issues with PHP installation. Experienced PHP developers, especially those who use *n*x operating systems, will probably breeze through all of this. Anyone who is new to PHP and only used to Windows, on the other hand, may run into the same problems that I am having.
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I’ve managed to find a few hours to peek around Delphi for PHP. What it can do is very impressive. Getting to do it for myself is going to take a little longer, if only because I’m unused to the OOP aspects of PHP5. In the meantime, however, here are some observations.

Deployment is easy. There’s a wizard that looks through your application, decides what files you need, and copies them to where you want them – either a local web server or the upload directory of your site management software. I did encounter one small problem. I uploaded one of the sample applications and, when I ran it remotely, was told that a file was missing (specifically, for folks at CodeGear, the windows.php sample application appears to require the adodb subdirectory of the VCL, but the upload wizard missed it). Fixing that was trivial. You can see the sample application here. Yeah, I know it doesn’t do much, but look, there are windows in a web browser, and it took only 53 lines of code, several of which were whitespace, to do that.

Doing something more complicated runs you into problems. There’s a nice list box demo that allows you to enter items and add them to a list. When I run it in the IDE it works fine. When I deploy it I get an error saying “The Input Filter PHP extension is not setup on this PHP installation”. I haven’t worked out what that means yet, but I suspect it may be fairly critical to the performance of the VCL.

And finally, if you want something rather more competent, there’s a nice article about developing components on Steve Trefethen’s blog.

Update: The Input Filter thing appears to be a means of filtering user input to ensure that nothing malicious gets inserted into your site – very important. The Delphi for PHP distribution comes with a “recommended” version of the PHP.INI file, and I’m guessing that if I compare that to what I’ve got I’ll be able to find out which configuration parameters I need to change on my local testing server. Then I need to work out how to make the same changes on my host. This will probably all be obvious to experienced PHP developers, but somewhat mysterious to everyone else. More on this later, but I need to be out of the office today so progress will be slow.