code – Enavigo

Enabling Oracle OCI8 PHP Extension on OS X Snow Leopard

My current project involves using PHP with an Oracle database. Oracle apparently embraces PHP warmly and as such supports an open source database driver for the environment called OCI8. As a Mac user I was looking to use OS X's built-in Apache and PHP setup, which like many PHP installations does not have the Oracle OCI8 driver installed or enabled. It took me some time and research to get it up and running. I was using Oracle Express, a limited capability, free-ish version of Oracle's database. Oracle Express was installed on a separate Windows machine as it cannot run or be installed on Snow Leopard. I also assume that you enabled PHP in your Apache configuration (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf) and have a /etc/php.ini by copying it from /etc/php.ini.default.

OCI8 relies on OS X having several client libraries and tools from Oracle installed on OS X. For most intents and purposes download the 64-bit version of the following files under the title "Version 10.2.0.4 (64-bit)":

Registration is required for all downloads.

SBJSON: Testing for nil / NULL value

I am playing with a variety of JSON frameworks in Objective-C. All are severely under-documented but then, they are simple to use, right? No. Nonetheless, I am deeply in awe and in debt to the great individuals who invested endless hours of their time to build these libraries and give them to us to use free of charge. Thanks you.

Anyway, SBJSON from Stig Brautaset, which I am examining right now, exposed a relatively weird issue. How do you test for null values in the contents of the parsed NSDictionary at hand?

Plain old ([dictionary valueForKey:@"key"] == null) will not work. The breakthrough came when looking at the dictionary printout to gdb (Right-click the object in memory and select 'Print Description to Console'). The null value was 'stored' in a CFNull reference. To test whether a pointer is pointing at CFNull, you do this:

myVariable == kCFNull where kCFNull is a special memory address dedicated to hold this special null (nil!) value.