Monday, December 17. 2007
Book Review: PHP Oracle Web Development
The good folks from Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a few books to review and I've been a little lax posting a review, so over the next few days I hope to have them all up. Overall I would have to say that PHP Oracle Web Development is a good book for a PHP developer needing to get up to speed quickly working with an Oracle database. I've worked with Oracle before using other languages, but never with PHP. I found the chapters progressed through the various topics in a logical and straightforward manner. It was easily to follow along, of course coding as you go, and easy to understand what was going on.
There were some features that, prior to this, I hadn't used before, such as their native XML support. Lately, I have been using DB2 and XQuery and was both surprised and glad to find the book cover some of this. Again, easy to understand and follow. After about 15 minutes, I was doing all sorts of crazy XML operations within Oracle.
The only place I found the book lacking was the initial setup of the environment. This is definitely a minor nit, but something that was a bit frustrating until I got it all working. The book tends to favor a Windows installation, which usually is simple anyways. I decided, however, to install on my linux box. The missing step came when I was trying to configure the oci8 extension in PHP. I was not using the instant client and had not setup the environment, so things weren't found. After checking the oci8 config.m4 in PHP, I found it was looking for ORACLE_HOME. A little searching and I found that all I needed was to execute a shell command (included in the Oracle install) to have them properly setup:
/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh
After that, install went smoothly. Now, the only other issue I am having is trying to configure PHP to work on my Fedora 8 system using the 11.1 instant client. The configure script (using PHP 5.2 from CVS that does support this Oracle version) doesn't like it for some reason. Something to work on another day.
All in all, I would definitely recommend this book, PHP Oracle Web Development, to a PHP developer needing to learn or at least have a reference book on integrating with Oracle.
Updated 12/19/2007: I finally resolved the instant client issue on Fedora 8. Also fixed my typos :/
There were some features that, prior to this, I hadn't used before, such as their native XML support. Lately, I have been using DB2 and XQuery and was both surprised and glad to find the book cover some of this. Again, easy to understand and follow. After about 15 minutes, I was doing all sorts of crazy XML operations within Oracle.
The only place I found the book lacking was the initial setup of the environment. This is definitely a minor nit, but something that was a bit frustrating until I got it all working. The book tends to favor a Windows installation, which usually is simple anyways. I decided, however, to install on my linux box. The missing step came when I was trying to configure the oci8 extension in PHP. I was not using the instant client and had not setup the environment, so things weren't found. After checking the oci8 config.m4 in PHP, I found it was looking for ORACLE_HOME. A little searching and I found that all I needed was to execute a shell command (included in the Oracle install) to have them properly setup:
/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh
After that, install went smoothly. Now, the only other issue I am having is trying to configure PHP to work on my Fedora 8 system using the 11.1 instant client. The configure script (using PHP 5.2 from CVS that does support this Oracle version) doesn't like it for some reason. Something to work on another day.
All in all, I would definitely recommend this book, PHP Oracle Web Development, to a PHP developer needing to learn or at least have a reference book on integrating with Oracle.
Updated 12/19/2007: I finally resolved the instant client issue on Fedora 8. Also fixed my typos :/
Comments
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>After checking the oci8 connfig.m4 in PHP,
>I found it was looking for ORACLE_HOME.
No need to do that, it's in `./configure --help`:
-----
--with-oci8[=DIR] Include Oracle (OCI8) support. DIR defaults to $ORACLE_HOME.
Use --with-oci8=instantclient,/path/to/oic/lib
for an Oracle Instant Client installation
-----
=)
>I found it was looking for ORACLE_HOME.
No need to do that, it's in `./configure --help`:
-----
--with-oci8[=DIR] Include Oracle (OCI8) support. DIR defaults to $ORACLE_HOME.
Use --with-oci8=instantclient,/path/to/oic/lib
for an Oracle Instant Client installation
-----
=)
True, but more often than not, I actually find it faster and easier to just open and read the specific m4 file.
I like how the book doesn't cover installation in great detail - there are enough PHP installation resources out there already.
Pro PHP XML and Web Services
Rob Richards has posted his own review of the Packt Publishing ...
Tracked: Dec 18, 13:17
The other day, in my review of PHP Oracle Web Development, I mentioned that I was having problems enabling the oracle extension on Fedora 8. I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off eno
Tracked: Dec 19, 13:47