Sriram Natarajan's Weblog: Do more with Web Server

In addition to my day time job with  Sun Web Server 7 development,  I have recently got myself involved with Web Stack project that is responsible for integrating / improving the open source web tier technologies like PHP for Open Solaris.  As part of this project, we have now successfully integrated  PHP(version 5.2.4) with Open Solaris (Nevada) build 79b - aka known as Solaris Developer Express 01/08.  Finally, with SXDE 01/08, I believe that we are now one step closer to facilitate our customers choose SAMP stack for their development and production requirements.

So, what is cool with this integration ? -

• Includes tighter and built-in support for Apache 2 pre-fork MPM
  • Simply enabling Apache 2 SMF service is all is now required for developing PHP applications with your Web Server
  • For example
    • svcadm enable network/http:apache22
• tighter integration with PHP NetBeans IDE and also includes popular 3rd party PHP extensions like APC, XDebug and DTrace. 
• Includes out of the box support for commonly used PHP extensions like LDAP, SSL, SOAP, JSON, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PDO, XML, Zlib
• PHP is compiled with Sun Studio compiler and includes necessary compiler optimizations to derive the best performance on Solaris.

And what is not so cool ...

• With the current integration, popular PHP extensions like IMAP, MCrypt are still missing. We are very hopeful of  integrating the currently missing PHP extensions integrations , in the order of user popularity, in the next coming months.
• We all know that Open Solaris Developer Express 01/08 includes MySQL 5.0 database as well. However, due to a build issue, PHP is still looking for MySQL 4.0 client libraries instead of the default MySQL 5.0 client libraries. This issue is now resolved with Nevada build 83.  So, for now, here is a temporary work around to work around this issue
  • Open a terminal and become root from your Open Solaris box
  • Run the following command

  • ln -sf  /usr/mysql/5.0/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0 /usr/mysql/5.0/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.12

We very much want to hear your thoughts on what we did right and how we can improve. So, please consider joining Web Stack discussion forum.

If this interests you, do give Solaris Developer Express 01/08 a spin and let us know. Instead of a stable build, if you would prefer to try out the latest and greatest, you can also check out - Open Solaris Community Express - (recent milestone build) . 

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