Moving existing system: ColdFusion 2 PHP

[Anon]

Hi folks,

[[ This was posted to the PHP General list as well, sorry if that offends
anyone, I am just fishing for an answer... ]]

I'm looking for a bit of advice here, and probably someone to whom I
can fire off an email if I run into trouble.

We have a system written in ColdFusion (for anyone who knows Melbourne
IT, I'm talking about our Digital Certificates sales system, not our
Domain Name Registration system, which is already using PHP 🙂) which
I am trying to drag kicking and screaming into PHP code because we don't
have any CF developers.

The system is currently running using Cold Fusion on *nix (ie, NOT
the Windows NT CF that everyone seems to use), and talks to an Oracle
database.

I'm not sure how it's talking to the Oracle database, if it is
talking directly to it, or using unixODBC (which I found references
to in /usr/local/coldfusion). As I don't know the first thing about
Cold Fusion, I am sort of floundering here.

I guess what I need is:
1. How can I tell whether Cold Fusion is using native Oracle calls
or using ODBC to talk to the database?
2. In the CF files, I see reference to variables that I can't see
defined anywhere: "#Application.datasource1#" etc etc. Where can
I find the file that defines these variables?
3. Because other parts of our business rely on the database itself,
I can't reconstruct it in MySQL. I need to replace just the
Cold Fusion, and leave the database as-is. I guess this means
I'll need PHP to have either ODBC or Oracle support. Anyone
able to tell me which is easier to get up and running?

Can anyone shed some light on this for me? It would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Jason

[jordanj]

Hey man.. I can't answer all of those questions for you, but I can possibly give you some informaion that may be helpful.

There should be a file called application.cfm someplace in your document root. This file is similar to asp's global.asa. In there is should tell you a little more about the #application.datasource1# what not..

I am not sure about ODBC, but I have complied and installed php to work with Oracle. What you will need to do, is install the oracle client software someplace on your machine. Then you will need to compile php to use the oracle functions.. blah blah.. lemme know if you need anymore help or what not

[Anon]

I've found the Application.cfm, thanks 🙂

I've just spent the last 2 hours with our sysadmin trying to get PHP 4.0.5 installed with Oracle. We've got Oracle 8.1.5 and 8.1.7 around here.

Could you send the configure line you used to get Oracle support into PHP? We've tried --with-oci8=/home/oracle/program/8.1.5 ... which compiles nicely (so it obviously has access to the libraries), but when we actually load the resulting php .so file into Apache and restart it, it complains of a missing ld(something).so file.

Confused now... could you send the configure line please? (btw, we're on a Solaris box)

[jordanj]

where is the configuration I used:

./configure --with-apache=../apache_1.3.14 --enable-memory-limit=yes --enable-debug=no --enable-track-vars --enable-ftp --with-oci8=/u01/app/oracle/product/8.1.7

dunno if that is going to help you out any..

here is my apache config line..

./configure --prefix=/app/apache --activate-module=src/modules/php4/libphp4.a --enable-module=php4 --server-uid=web --server-gid=web

[Anon]

Thanks for the help either way - it's appreciated, I've passed this on to the sysadmin.

Ta!

Jason