Gifted: OCI8 1.3.0 Extension Beta
Good news for PHP propeller heads everywhere: a Beta of the OCI8 1.3.0 extension, which supports the Database Resident Connection Pooling feature in Oracle Database 11g, is now available (under the open-source PHP License) in the PECL repository. (You can also read a technical description of DRCP here.) The driver is backward-compatible to 9.2, but you'll need 11.1 and later to take advantage of DRCP, Fast Application Notification, and other new features.
Maintained by Wez Furlong (aka Dr. Evil), Andi Gutmans, Antony Dovgal, and Oracle's own Chris Jones, this new extension promises to bring yet more stability and scalability to Web applications built on Oracle+PHP. There is an ungodly amount of community energy out there around this (OPAL) stack -- still less than LAMP (to be expected), but growing to be sure. It's a worldwide phenomenon and Java fanboys everywhere have a right to be annoyed.
