VSI-AXPVMS-PHP-V0506-10L-1-RNOTES.PDF

This document announces the January 2021 release of PHP 5.6.10 for VSI OpenVMS IA64 and Alpha, explicitly stating that this will be the final release of PHP 5.6.10 by VSI.

The primary motivation for this release is to introduce several additional extensions that were previously unimplemented but will also be included in future, newer PHP for VSI OpenVMS releases. Key new features in this update include dynamically loadable PHP modules for interaction with VSI DATATRIEVE, Oracle RDB, Mimer relational databases, and Redis, as well as a simple OpenVMS distributed lock manager extension and minor improvements to the SQLite extension.

This port is based on the PHP 5.6.10 Open Source distribution, providing the core language interpreter and a wide range of dynamically loadable extensions for various functionalities like database client APIs, XML, compression, arbitrary precision arithmetic, web services (SOAP and REST), and graphics.

Installation is performed using an OpenVMS PCSI kit. Requirements include VSI OpenVMS 8.4-1H1, an ODS-5 enabled disk, and optionally CSWS 2.4 for VSI OpenVMS if using MOD_PHP5 for Apache integration (which requires manual configuration). Users must manually remove any existing HP CSWS_PHP before installation. Post-installation steps involve configuring system startup/shutdown scripts and defining the PHP foreign command.

Known problems and restrictions include incompatibility of MOD_PHP5.EXE with CSWS versions prior to 2.4, the requirement for PHP script files to be stream-lf, and current issues with Composer Dependency Manager (expected to be addressed in future releases). When using PHP with CSWS and MOD_PHP, temporary files are created and require specific handling for proper cleanup.

The document concludes with a list of numerous included extensions, such as those for various databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC, OCI8 and MIMERDB for IA64 only), web services, and other core PHP functionalities.