REMEMBER TO SAVE THE SCREEN BEFORE HITTING SAVE :( MUST ADDRESS THAT SECURITY VIOLATION! NOW TO TRY AND REMEMBER WHAT I HAD ADDED.

I am going around in circles on trying to upgrade to newer versions of software on the web stack. That my existing stack is working perfectly is demonstrated by the fact that I am writing these blog posts, and while there are niggles in some of the functionality, the content from 25 years of use is still fully accessible. The stack that is currently stable is Nginx 1.21.5, PHP 7.3.33, Firebird 3.0.4.33054 and using libraries ADOdb 5.21.0 (? on that) and Smarty 3.1.28.

That the current versions are a lot higher means that there are several areas that need major work to establish a clean codebase. This is not helped by the fact that changes to ADOdb and Smarty need their own major work in bitweaver to use the current versions and it may be easier to fork the older versions which is what I've been doing currently ... and now getting into something of a mess. Hence this post. Just where am I currently in identifying what is actually broken and still needs fixing. What has not been helping is that I do have a working setup which is throwing warnings on page templates that still need tidying, but as long as I do not log in it is displaying the content ... from a Firbird 5 database. The problem comes trying to log in, and I'm finally seeing that the firebird drivers are struggling when using 'UPDATE' sql scripts. These give a result of '1' rather than a result set on the generic driver and switching to the pdo driver which is the prefered option for PHP8.4 is not actually creating a connection and more irritatingly not resulting in a clean exception which is the prefered way of handling these errors. Something that I think is messed up by the way bitweaver wraps exceptions and a bit more work.

I need to roll back to IBTEST.PHP and check just the Firebird driver side of things to see what is broken there! That I had stopped working on that was a mistake, but with bitweaver seeming to work with the more modern stack is misleading. I have ibtest.php running on PHP7.3, and now that I know just what the problems are in bitweaver, going back to test this again will be easier. While I have FB5 on the development, FB3 is running on the server and the windows machine, so I have the option to upgrade the windows machine to FB4 if needed.

So what is the development stack? Nginx 1.27.4, PHP 8.4.5, Firebird 5.0.2.1613 and using libraries ADOdb 5.21.4 and Smarty 3.1.28, both with mods to remove deprecated and warning messages. I also have PHP 7.4.33 with the firebird driver 5.0.1 and PHP 8.3.19 with firebird driver 3.0.1 but not sure on the pdo driver versions. At least I do have full control of building these drivers and that should make life easier. It would seem that I can avoid needing to worry about PHP8.0, 1 and 2 since I have had PHP8.4 running while not logged in, and I can apply the same changes to the code base to bring all the templates and code up to the same level. In actual fact, tidying the whole of the template suite may be worth the effort if I can move up from Bootstrap3 to Bootstrap5 or even some alternate page system.

I had tried Laravel but the laravel-firebird driver has only been tested with Laravel11, PHP8.3 and Firebird 4 and that may be hitting the same problem I have. Dropping back to PHP8.3 is easy and testing with FB3 should also be possible, but while I thought it was a possible option, it would seem it's only really a half way house to bitweaver and I would have to find code to support all that frameworks features.