SAPI: Mbedthis AppWeb

Sara,

Thanks for the quick feedback.

I'll check out the coding standards and cross that off the list first.

Regarding the applicability, we address two markets that may be
of strong interest to the broader market. When we say "embedded" we mean
embedded in devices or applications. We find that over 50% of our
customers are using AppWeb in applications not devices.

There are three primary solutions AppWeb is being used for in apps:

1. Personal Web Servers. People want a very simple installation that
   supports PHP, yet still offers security and a strong feature set.

2. Web Sites on a CD. You can take an existing PHP web site with pages and
   code and create a single bootable CD with little or no modification to
   your site.

3. Online / Offline apps. This is more emerging, but we have a number of
   folks who want to take an existing PHP site and allow it to operate
   offline, cache the results in the local SQLite db and the flush / sync
   back when they are in range.

For these three solutions, a small, secure yet fully featured web server
is needed. AppWeb is relatively new so I understand moving slowly.

Any help in this process is appreciated.

Michael O'Brien

On Fri, 02 Jul 2004 14:22:34 -0700, Sara
Golemon wrote:

We've been supporting PHP4 and now PHP5 for a while and have a PHP handler
for our embedded web server. We are seeing growing interest and have quite
a few folks using this solution.

Our goal has been to bring PHP effectively to embedded devices. Many
devices have larger memories (e.g. industrial PC devices) and a simple and
integrated packaging of PHP with an embedded web server, often into a
single static executable -- is an ideal solution.

I wanted to take the next step and get our SAPI interface integrated into
the core PHP distribution like Apache etc. What is the process for doing
this. And no, I'm not expecting this to be in the release cut of PHP
5.0.0. ;-)

I would expect the first step would be checking your code against
http://cvs.php.net/co.php/php-src/CODING_STANDARDS to be sure that it is
ready for import and provide a link to the source code of sapi/Mbedthis (or
whatever you've called it) so that it can be evaluated by the PHP community
at large. From there, concerns can be addressed as to the usability of your
sapi and it's appropriateness for inclusion in the distribution.

On that note, since this sapi has a relatively small (as a percentage)
applicability to PHP installations in general, I would wonder if the PECL
repository could be adapted to hold SAPI implementations.

To continue that thread, I've also wondered if PECL can be used for other
PHP related add-ons which don't map to PHPAPI extensions. Such as a patch
to add an additional opcode to the Zend lexer/parser, or implement operator
overloading for objects (both items which I've applied effort to offline but
have no expectation of seeing them included in the standard distribution).

-Sara

--
Michael O'Brien
Mbedthis Software
mob@mbedthis.com
http://www.mbedthis.com
(425) 890-1590