[Info-vax] PHP

[Rich Jordan]

I was very disappointed to see no mention of an upgrade to PHP for SWS
in the roadmap, especially after hearing last year that one was due
out "soon".  All they list is the 'current' version, no mention of any
updates.

PHP (and to be fair Perl), even the ancient version now available has
been instrumental in our being able to keep several VMS systems in a
'primary' usage situation... without it more than one site would have
ended up buying a wintel server to host their wiki/cms/etc internal
websites on, further relegating their VMS boxes to a legacy, get off
it as soon as possible mode.  With PHP we were able to provide the
newer functionality they wanted using various open source packages, at
little cost, and place emphasis on how versatile (and important) that
nice multitasking reliable secure Alphaserver really is.

We're running into a wall with one site now due to the decrepitude of
the available PHP version.  The newer releases of their chosen package
are dropping support (and operability) with PHP V4.anything.  This is
going to be impacting at least some of the others soon, and we're
going to have 'legacy, unsupported' rubbed in our faces again as we're
forced to get them some wintel box to provide basic functionality.

Rich