why

Why am i doing this

a while ago a friend of mine discovered olab as a nice choice for some of his science projects. Unfortunately, olab has run out of time. It is still a php5 app and php5 is reaching End of Life. Sure enough it is hard to find a server offering php5 installation as an option at all, so hosting olab on your own has become an art to itself. So i offered to check whether olab could be transformed into a php7 aware/compatible app.

At first it seemed to be only a matter of the installer - it still uses the now deprecated mysql extension. So conversion to mysqli seemed the easiest choice here. Even though there are helper tools out there, it turned out that only a few tweaks to the installer were necessary to get it running in PHP7 :)

Why not move to olab4

olab4 is a complete rewrite yet far away from being ready to fly (as far as i understand). Also from reading pages related to the project it seems to me that the scope of the project is going far beyond the ideas of olab3.