"PHP has been a cornerstone technology on the Web for more than a
decade. While its adoption among mainstream IT organizations has been
limited in the past, many corporate application development (AD)
projects are discovering the unique benefits of PHP."

One particular advice is especially interesting for large companies.

"Consider PHP as a supporting technology in a broader portfolio of AD
technologies, where it can provide a specialized toolset for building
Web graphical user interface (GUI) front ends to service-oriented
architecture (SOA) back-end services."

PHP is a fantastic tool for building rich web applications. It’s extensibility makes it versatile and extremely easy to integrate with modern integration solutions as Web Methods, legacy systems or just about any database technology.

To me – this has always been where PHP really shines.

Naturally I went to the almighty Google for the answer. There are a few excel writers written out there. I found a tutorial on using PEAR Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer and an MS-Excel Stream Handler class to mention two solutions.

I found one piece of code floating around numerous places that I fell for. I am not sure about the original source for this code though. Extremely simple.

function xlsBOF() {
    return pack("ssssss", 0x809, 0x8, 0x0, 0x10, 0x0, 0x0);
}

function xlsEOF() {
    return pack("ss", 0x0A, 0x00);
}

function xlsWriteNumber($Row, $Col, $Value) {
    return pack("sssss", 0x203, 14, $Row, $Col, 0x0)
      .pack("d", $Value);
}

function xlsWriteLabel($Row, $Col, $Value ) {
    $L = strlen($Value);
    return pack("ssssss", 0x204, 8 + $L, $Row, $Col, 0x0, $L)
      .$Value;
}

I liked it because it did what I wanted with a minimum of fuss. I was happy until I realized I don’t understand it enough to be able to set the character set. Right now question marks appear in the texts instead of national Swedish characters as å, ä and ö.

At work we just had a meeting discussing all the technologies and applications that we are working on at the moment. Currently, my small team of three people including myself, are integrating and developing systems using PHP, javascript, Java, C, C++, C#, ASP, Orbix  (corba), SOAP, MS CMS, MS Commerce Server, BizTalk, Oracle, MS SQL Server. We even support a Powerbuilder application on top of this. All these applications and systems run on linux, Solaris, Tru64 and windows environments. No wonder my head is spinning from time to time.

So it is time to let go and start focus on other things. I have decided to spend the following six months pursuing opportunities in rich web applications using technologies like PHP/C and javascript on *nix. Throw in SOAP and databases, maybe even some XSL, in the mix and I’d be more than interested…

Next week I will have a break from all this. I’ll spend a week in Puerto Banús, Spain, with my family. We will stay in a really nice two story apartment with all the stuff and fluff you really don’t need; outdoor pool, a huge plasma TV screen as well as a broadband connection. Hopefully I won’t use the latter…

So even if better SOAP support and a more thought out database layer in PDO are both helping PHP in the enterprise world I still miss one extension to really help me attack java based web applications. A good CORBA extension. I just saw that Iona have started a new CORBA community and a quick search there for PHP came up with nothing.

There have been a couple of tests in this area with the old Satellite PHP extension and then the Universe PHP extension. These were really only good as showcases. Are there any good examples of PHP and CORBA out there? It would be really interesting to see if anyone have used for example ORBit, ORBacus or Iona Orbix for C++. Please send me an email if you know something I don’t!

Many people don’t like the idea of putting binary files in a database. I on the other hand have always enjoyed having all data, textual and binary, in the same place. What better than having it all nicely tucked away in a comfy database. The site is handled by the version handling system and the data is backed up in the normal db backup routine.  But when the system is a RedHat 7.3 using ASP mixed with PHP with ODBC connections to an MS SQL Server I really start to grind my teeth.

I didn’t want to rewrite things for free. So when I took the site onboard I only had to rewrite the actual file uploading. As it is using SUN One ASP (former Chilisoft ASP) I had to use the Chili component for this. It all went smoothly until I tried to put the uploaded data into the database. For some reason I just couldn’t get the Recordset to be updatable.

Set rs1 = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
sql = "select id, prodpic from product where id = '" & ref & "'"
rs1.Open sql, conn, 3, 3
rs1.Fields("bild").appendChunk picturechunk
rs1("bild").value = fblob
rs1.Update

As I don’t really like, or know, ASP (I haven’t touched VB since VB4 was new and Microsoft said it was as fast as compiled C++) I decided that the quickest way out of this would be to convert the script to PHP. As the application is a horrible mix already I figured it wouldn’t make things worse. That should do it. No problem at all.

Well it was a problem. ODBC has this limitation on the size of an SQL statement. You can only send through SQL statements with a maximum of 4096 bytes (or something like that). I knew this and I also knew you solve it by using a combination of the methods odbc_prepare and odbc_execute. You have two different ways of sending binary data this way. Well the ODBC driver (Free TDS) puked on me again and again. Go figure.

Then as the genius I am I said to myself. Chunks, concatenation. Yeah. Something like below should work. I’ve done the same with MySQL queries in some circumstances.

$fdata = base64_encode(get_file_contents($filepath));
$total = strlen($fdata);
$pos = 0;

while ($pos < $total)
  {
      $len = ($pos + 2048 > $total) ? $total - $pos : 2048;
      $substr = substr($fdata, $pos, $len);
      $sql = "update product set prodpic = prodpic + '$substr' where id='$ref'";
      db_exec($sql);
      $pos += $len;
  }

After puzzling awhile over the weird results this gave I turned to the almighty web for answers. It turns out MS SQL Server only supports concatenation of datatypes not capable of storing large amounts of data. So for the datatypes image and text it is impossible. Wonderful.

So now I just save the files on the filesystem instead. Have to setup backup routines for the machine though. Something I thought would take about an hour to fix finally took more than two days of coding and research.

Hopefully I learn some valueable lesson from all of this but I’m sure I won’t.

I recently encountered a problem in the ext/soap extension in PHP5 (version 5.0.2). I’ve been using the extension in development only so far and it has proved to be quite stable.

The PHP soap server I’ve written run on Tru64 and exposes a weird C API that I wrapped in a custom extension. So this soap server is going to be used as a wrapper for this legacy proprietary system. It all seemed to work great until a system written in a.NET environment wanted to hook up a client to the server…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
 xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
 xmlns:tns="http://spock/kunta/kunta"
 xmlns:types="http://spock/kunta/kunta/encodedTypes"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

<soap:Body
soap:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
 <q1:bassCall xmlns:q1="http://spock/bass/types/kunta">
  <system xsi:type="xsd:string">XXX</system>
  <function xsi:type="xsd:string">TASKTEST</function>
  <parameter href="#id1" />
 </q1:bassCall>

 <soapenc:Array id="id1" soapenc:arrayType="tns:Item[1]">
  <Item href="#id2" />
 </soapenc:Array>

 <tns:Item id="id2" xsi:type="tns:Item">
  <key xsi:type="xsd:string">ABCabc123</key>
  <val xsi:type="xsd:string">123456</val>
 </tns:Item>

</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

The weather is absolutely wonderful today. The sun is bright and warm and the view over the bay where I work is absolutely stunning a day like this. It is hard to bring yourself to do some serious work.

My small wooden boat that I tarred this last weekend is constantly nagging my mind and I want to get into water soon. If it weren’t for all these annoying deadlines at work I would take the rest of the day off and paint the hull.

The project I am working on is very interesting though. I am integrating the billing system at Vodafone Sweden with WebMethods and other systems. The billing system is written in an obscure but rather fast 4GL language called ProIV. The integration solution is a heavily multithreaded C applicaton with plugins that communicate with various systems natively. It is great fun with many technical difficulties, but the wonderful spring weather and my boat not yet ready for the sea stops me from enjoying it fully.