There comes the time to upgrade.
I want to reflect on the past to propel to the future!
At that time, my goal was only to update this extension for PHP 7.0.
At that time, I have written a couple of little programs in C, most in C++, and so many in PHP since its version 3.
I have taken out the Win32Service extension from the oldest SVN repository on May 29 2016. The most recent SVN commit is on July 26 2011.
It is hard work to understand how to write a PHP extension, but with time, documentation, books, friends and labor, I released version 0.1.2-dev on October 16 2016.
At that time, some ground-work was done.
- The AppVeyor service was set on the project.
- The DLL are built for x86 and amd64
- The DLL are available with (TS) and without (NTS) Thread Safe mode.
But the work was far from done, and the first version really usable for PHP 7.0 was version 0.2.0, released on March 23 2017.
The work for version 0.2 span over 10 months during my free time. I’m really proud of my work.
Since the 0.2 version, I have released one other version in 2017, two in 2018, three in 2019 (four versions soon)…
I have added some features asked by users in the old PHP documentation comments, on the PHP bug tracker or directly.
However, I have just received a little bit of feedback despite my calls for it.
Of course, I use Twitter to send my calls and the world is not only on Twitter, however, my network is so small, and my contacts don’t have an interests to forward my calls…
One can ask who in 2017, 2018, 2019, works on the Windows platform to write a PHP application when needing to run a script in the background? Who?
You would be surprised by the amount of people on Windows running PHP scripts, it is far greater than what you imagine.
The download statistics available from the Pecl website show the interest for this extension.
The most downloaded version (v0.1. excluded) is version 0.2.1. The next one is 0.3.0, not 0.3.1 nor the last one: 0.3.2. Why? Surely because version 0.3.0 is the last version available for PHP 7.0!
Dear PHP developers, why don’t you update PHP? (This is a genuine question, please answer in the comments.)
So, as version 7.4 of PHP will be coming soon and I will release a new version. It is time to migrate to the latest version!
I need to thank you for your trust and if you want some help to upgrade your application, you can contact me in the comments.
See also: