The Site With the Lamp

July 24, 2004

It seems my efforts to configure PHP 5 with java 5 support was a complete and utter waste of time. Java 5 or any version of java, for that matter cannot be used with PHP 5. It's perhaps more accurate to say a java extension for PHP 5 is conspicous by it's absense.

Since PHP5 is said to be so much better than PHP4 in every aspect I didn't bother to find out about the availability of the java extension before my efforts at installation. Last week' attempts to install PHP5 were unsuccesfull due to a conflict with turck mmcache. However at the time I was working with a beta of PHP5. Yesterday I tried with the 'gold release' and managed to have it installed without any problems at all. However the java extension did not show up with a call to phpinfo();

It was then that I examined the ext/ folder to find that the java extension is missing, then I thought it might be available at PECL but I was wrong again. Finally I did what I should have done right at the start; visited zend.com and did some reading only to find that the java extension has been 'temporarily' dropped from PHP 5.

So much for the tremoundous improvements.