Note: If you are interested in the JavaScript components only, this information does not apply.
There is nothing serverside you need. Just read the installation manual for the javaScript part.
Operating System
We are developing sites on and for Linux and Windows.
For development some of us prefer Windows, other Linux.
For productivity we absolutely recommend using Linux.
It should be possible to use BlueShoes on any system where PHP runs, altough some
rare code changes for certain special tasks may be needed.
We have installed BlueShoes on:
- Linux RedHat
- Debian
- Sun Linux (Cobalt)
- Windows 2000 Server
- Windows NT 4
Web Server
We use and highly recommend Apache for all projects.
Version 1.3.x works fine, version 2 is fine too.
Microsoft IIS may be possible, but does not offer some of the neat Apache features (modules), like
mod_rewrite.
Any PHP-capable Server should do. But the configuration is set up for Apache.
PHP
The latest stable version of PHP is usually recommended.
At least version 4.1.2 is needed, 4.3+ is recommended.
If you upgrade, please check the changelog and read about register_globals (which is turned off by default now).
Known evil versions:
- PHP 4.3.2RC2: It does not initialize class vars correctly that have a default value of -1. The same applies for function params.
DB Server
A database is useful for many tasks. BlueShoes offers abstraction layers for
MySQL,
Oracle and
MsSQL, others may be added.
We prefer and recommend MySQL because of its speed, ease of use and feature range. This abstraction
layer class has the most features built in.
PHP-Accelerator
We highly recommend using a
PHP Cache.
The PHP-Accelerator caches your parsed and compiled code to memory.
This means that your code does not need to be read from file,
parsed and compiled each time the script is used.
There are different such caching solutions. We use the one from ionCube, and recommend
ionCube and the Zend Accelerator.
List
Hardware
The hardware depends on how many and what kind of hits your site gets. There is no
general answer.
PHP is very fast, faster than ASP, ColdFusion, JSP, Perl and others.
You may want to check the
speed matters article (PDF)
about speed and how to optimize your system/site.
