PHP MapScript: Take full advantage of PHP 5 / Zend Engine 2

[dmorissette]

This ticket is to track the switch to PHP 5 only, in MapServer 6.0, mainly to take advantage of PHP 5 / Zend Engine 2 mechanisms to better handle mapping of PHP class properties to C structs.

Full story:

At the moment, MapServer 5.x supports both PHP 5 and PHP 4. However, we do not take full advantage of some PHP 5 (ZEND Engine 2) features. I am thinking of better mechanisms to handle the mapping of C structs to PHP class properties for instance (see #3273).

The code will be simpler and easier to maintain if we can drop PHP 4 stuff completely and support only the PHP 5 (Zend Engine 2) way of doing things. PHP4 has reached its end of life on 2007-12-31 (2 years ago) and is no longer available on the php.net website, and PHP 5 has been around for about 5 years now, so I don't think that would be considered a drastic change. We voted on this on the -dev list and we got six +1 PSC votes in support of dropping PHP4 (plus two +1 from non-PSC members).

[aboudreault]

I've committed a first changeset in r9935.

[aboudreault]

Another changeset has been committed to make the new php mapscript error functions ZTS compatible in r9939.

[assefa]

compiles and runs on windows (tested loading a map and drawing).