The purpose of this section is to describe the installation of ADOdb. ADOdb does not come with PHP; it needs to be downloaded separately.  ADOdb can be downloaded from http://adodb.sourceforge.net. 

The installation is extremely simple. It consists of downloading the file, unpacking it and moving the resulting directory to the proper place. The proper place is any directory in the PHP search path.  The PHP search path is defined in the php.ini file by setting the include_path directory as shown in the example below:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Paths and Directories ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

; UNIX: "/path1:/path2"
include_path = ".:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/PHP"
;
; Windows: "\path1;\path2"
;include_path = ".;c:\php\includes"

The current directory and “/usr/local/lib/php” directories are put in the include path by the installation. The third directory, “/usr/local/PHP” is put in the path for the express purpose of downloading the third-party software, like ADOdb.

If PHP is installed as an Apache module, the Apache server needs to be restarted for the new settings to take effect.

This all prepares the reader to download either adodb454.tgz or adodb454.zip, depending on preferences. GUI utilities, such as WinZip can recognize both GNU gzip/tar format and older ZIP formats. It might be helpful to download the file ending in .tgz because it is smaller than the ZIP file. The contents of both files are the same and consist of the “adodb” directory, like the one pictured below:

This folder contains all files that ADOdb consists of and is essentially copied in the “right place” during the installation process. There is no need to modify anything in the adodb directory. In fact, doing so may render ADOdb unusable. Here is what is shown when the folder is entered:

ADOdb consists of 162 files and its total size is 1.5 MB which means that it is a very small library, by modern standards.

Now, that the proper directory is designated and the file downloaded, all that is left to do is to unpack the file in the designated directory. Voila!  The installation is complete. The result looks like the following:

$ pwd
/usr/local/PHP
$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x  13 root root 4096 Dec 12 21:20 adodb
$

Note that adodb is owned by root, to prevent unauthorized updates of the library and a possible security breach.

Installation is the same on both Windows and UNIX platforms. Documentation is good and plentiful, and it contains a great tutorial on how to use ADOdb with Oracle written by John Lim, the author of ADOdb library.

SEE CODE DEPOT FOR FULL SCRIPTS

http://www.rampant-books.com/book_2005_2_php_oracle.htm