Application conversion to PHP5, MySQL5

[damohickey]

Hi there,

 

We are at the point with our application, Freeway http://www.openfreeway.org, where some sites have over 10,000 reservations to recurring and ongoing events. This makes for some database load during complex reservation searches. We are temporarily relieving the pressure by creating a reservation archiving process, but before too long, as the profile of the stores which use Freeway continues to grow, it will be a regular expectation to scale to support up to 100,000 live reservations. While this is a good thing for the project, it places the onus on us to have a robust architecture.

 

The decision we have to make is to fly to PHP5/MySQL5 exclusively and take advantage of their advanced benefits for our next major version so we can speed these reservation searches for POS staff etc. However, as you are aware, we alienate all the users of older/legacy versions currently supported in doing so.

 

Does anyone know of a good source of information about this question? Who really knows PHP/MySQL and the shared hosting market well enough to comment in an informed manner about when the tipping point of shared hosting availability and user acceptance for change will arrive for PHP5 only and even better, PHP5/MySQL5?

 

With thanks,

 

Damian Hickey

[wildteen88]

PHP5 and MySQL5 are available now for installation. However it depends on the host whether or not they provide PHP5/MySQL5 on their hosting packages. Many hosts do provide both PHP5 and PHP4 with their hosts packages this differs from host to host, most hosts get you to save your .php files as .php5 or provide a setting the site control panel/.htacces. However not that PHP4 has comes to the end of life most hosts should start to provide PHP5 by default.

 

As for MySQL I am not sure.

 

Now is openfreeway your application you have developed (with a group of others)? If it is the I suggest you/all developers to sit down and to recode most of it because at the moment there is a lot of (user input) variable soap. You appear to use a mix of superglobals ($_GET, $_POST vars etc), register_long_arrays ($HTTP_*_VARS) and the worst of the all register_globals all over the place. The latter two register_long_arrays and register_globals has since been depreciated and is to be removed as of PHP6. They are also displabled by default on PHP5. Now you should only support one type of user input variable, not a mix and definably not provide support for register_globals if you can help it.

[damohickey]

Yes, you are right, it is highly advanced in functionality but we are engaged in an architecture review process where we are considering how we can break away finally from the inadequacies of osCommerce, of which Freeway is a fork from some time ago. The changes we have so far committed to are:

• 
  Templating with MVC perhaps modelled off Joomla 1.5
  
• Removal of all register_globals dependencies (There is already an override to work without register globals on.)
  
• Localisation with front end editing
  
• APIs for extension plugins
  

And maybe:

• PHP5 & MySQL5 only particularly in the case of the database for faster reservation searches.
  

 

I will search for this information and provide some feedback here as I get something useful as many others must be in the same position as us.

 

BTW: Yes, I am the leader of the project.

 

Cheers,

 

Damian