In my current environment we have many php developers. These php developers find coding with Java Web Frameworks to be cumbersome. We are currently using Struts 1.X  which although was not my first choice seems to be what was adopted . As a note : I am eagerly anticipating Web Beans (based on Jboss Seam) Reference Implementation to be standardized. http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=299

However they love all the other great stuff that comes with Java such as IDE (Eclipse)

Integration, JUnit, Spring, plethora of open source apis available in third party jars, etc…

So they would like the ability to be able to code business logic in java and code presentation logic in a dynamic language and specifically php. I also looked into groovy and this looks promising however its difficuly to justify learning a new language even if groovy is more java friendly than php.

I had previously played around with jsr 223. I played with the reference implementation and was able to get it working however it was sold as highly experimental and although Zend Technologies (bascially the owners of PHP) were part of the original JSR223 they seem to have dropped out the mix (I can only assume because Zend makes money on their own version of PHP – Java Integration so why would they throw that revenue down the drain).

See https://scripting.dev.java.net/ you’ll notice that PHP isnt really in the main list there. Which means that sun is not putting any effort into getting php to run under tomcat. However at the bottom of the pae you will notice the link for Caucho’s Quercus.

http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/- pure Java implementation of PHP

Caucho is responsible for Resin ( JEE App Server) and Hessian (Remoting Protocal) and now for Quercus.

I decided to look into this. I thought I would document what was done since the installation into an existing web app is really not documented anywhere on Caucho’s site.

What is Quercus, basically what Caucho did was write the a scripting engine for php in java, so they duplicated most if not all of the functionality in phps underlying C libraries. They claim this is much faster than in C and I cant speak to that, however there are blatant  benefits to using Javas Connection Pooling which I can see how this would speed things up dramaitically.  Basically with the Quercus jars installed on your classpath and the Quercus servlet enabled you can run php directly under you java web application and access java classes directly from php.

I had some issues initially with the conversion of java.math.BigDecimal but I put in a bug and they had it fixed within a week, which I thought was great.

To install Quercus:

I would pull the latest snapshot from subversion and build the jars, but you can also pull the war seperately and just copy the jars from inside of the web-inf lib there.

You can pull from subversion via this repository link and build the newest version of resin jars (mind you only need 3 jars).

svn://svn.caucho.com/resin/trunk

You can get the war from here:

http://quercus.caucho.com/

You can just install the war and begin editing php scripts , but I’m more interested in using php in existing web apps we have. So I pulled in the quercus jars. Namely:

quercus.jar

script-10.jar

resin-util.jar

If you have an existing web application place all of these in the

WEB-INF/lib of your application. I installed these as third party jars in maven and listed them as dependencies. I had some problems with Windows locking the jars during a redeploy so I recommend putting these jars in $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib this way you can redeploy and not worry abou these files continuing to remain locked and blocking the undeploy during development.

The next thing is to enable the caucho php interpreting servlet, the example for this is in the quercus war.

    <servlet>

          <servlet-name>Quercus Servlet</servlet-name>

          <servlet-class>com.caucho.quercus.servlet.QuercusServlet</servlet-class>

          <!-- Specifies the encoding Quercus should use to read in PHP scripts.

               Uncomment this if you're having "invalid utf-8" errors.

          -->

          <!--

          <init-param>

            <param-name>script-encoding</param-name>

            <param-value>ISO-8859-1</param-value>

          </init-param>

          -->

          <!-- Tells Quercus to use the following JDBC database and to ignore the

               arguments of mysql_connect().

               - From Sinner

               Note this must be JNDI configured (see readme)

               and wont work with CMS Spring Configured Non JNDI pool

               this wont be an issue if all bus logic is done in spring anyways

               but if you want to use php mysql libraries directly another connection

               pool will need to be configured via JNDI

          -->

          <!--

          <init-param>

            <param-name>database</param-name>

            <param-value>jdbc/test</param-value>

          </init-param>

          -->

          <!--

          <init-param>

            <param-name>php-ini-file</param-name>

            <param-value>WEB-INF/php.ini</param-value>

          </init-param>

          -->

      </servlet>

      <servlet-mapping>

      <servlet-name>Quercus Servlet</servlet-name>

      <url-pattern>*.php</url-pattern>

      </servlet-mapping>

Once this is done put some php scripts under your web applications web root and access them and you’ll see that php is interpreted inside of the tomcat web container. Now what is really intersting about this is that now you can also access java classes from inside of the php scripts.

Below is an example of a php script accessing a Java Spring Managed Business Logic Bean and using several java classes. This opens a lot of possibilities and I’m somewhat concerned about how the code will be developed and if seperation of concerns (wrt MVC will be maintained) however it certainly allows for quick prototyping and the other benefits that go along with a Dynamic Language such as PHP.

See how the java imports are used and how java classes are accessed from the php script.

<?php

import java.lang.Double;

import com.cms.php.BigDecimalFactory;

import java.math.BigDecimal;

import java.util.ArrayList;

import java.util.Date;

import com.cms.shared.Utility;

import com.cms.shared.ext.firestorm.FirestormUtil;

import com.cms.shared.security.SecurityUser;

import com.cms.fuel.FuelManager;

import com.cms.fuel.exceptions.FuelException;

import com.cms.fuel.FuelmasterQueryParams;

import com.cms.shared.gen.firestorm.cmssql.dto.Fuelmaster;

import com.cms.shared.gen.firestorm.cmssql.dto.FuelmasterPriceComponent;

FirestormUtil::setChgProg($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']); //set for auditing

FirestormUtil::setChguser("???"); //need to set for auditing, have to get security worked out

//how to call a static method

$springApplicationContext = FirestormUtil::getSpringApplicationContext();

//get manager

$fuelManager = $springApplicationContext->getBean("fuelManager");

echo '<br/>var_dump($fuelManager)=';

var_dump($fuelManager);//displays toString or that of object if that is all there is

$companyId = "20";

$locationId  = "SFB";

$category = "IR";

$trtype = "PUR";

$effdate= new Date();

$vendor = "005069";

$creditAccount = "130047";

$debitAccount = "150047";

$params = new FuelmasterQueryParams();

$params->setComp($companyId);

$params->setLocn($locationId);

$params->setCategory($category);

$params->setTrtype($trtype);

$params->setEffdate($effdate);

$params->setVendor($vendor);

$params->setFirstResult(0);

$params->setMaxResults(null);

$fuelmasterList = $fuelManager->getFuelmasters($params);

foreach ($fuelmasterList as $fuelmaster)

{

      echo '<br/>$fuelmaster=';

      echo $fuelmaster; //will display toString method of fuelmaster dto

      //var_dump($fuelmaster->getRate());

}

//$double = Double::parseDouble(3.1);

//var_dump($double);

$bigDecimal = new BigDecimal(3.3);

echo '<br/>var_dump($bigDecimal)=';

var_dump($bigDecimal);

//insert fuel manager

try {

      $dto = new Fuelmaster(); //Firestorm DTO

      $dto->setComp($companyId);

      $dto->setLocn($locationId);

      $dto->setCategory($category);

      $dto->setTrtype($trtype);

      $dto->setEffdate($effdate);

      $dto->setVendor($vendor);

      $dto->setGlacct($creditAccount);

      $dto->setGllocn($locationId);

      $dto->setGloffset($debitAccount);

      $dto->setGloflocn($locationId);

      $dto->setRate($bigDecimal);

      $dto->setIncident($bigDecimal);

      $dto->setRatetype("U"); //Unit * Rate + Incident

      $prices = new ArrayList();

      //always include default price as first in the price list

      $price = new FuelmasterPriceComponent();

      $price->setFuelmasterRecId($dto->getRecId());  

      $price->setUnits(new BigDecimal(0));     

      $price->setRate($dto->getRate());  

      $price->setComments("DEFAULT PRICE");          

      $prices->add($price);

      $fuelManager->insertFuelmaster($dto, $prices);

      $newDto = $fuelManager->getFuelmaster($dto->getComp(),

                  $dto->getLocn(), $dto->getCategory(),

                  $dto->getTrtype(), $dto->getEffdate(),

                  $dto->getVendor()

                  );

      echo '<br/>$newDto';

      echo $newDto;

} catch (Exception $e) {

      echo "Caught exception: ".  $e->getMessage();

      //echo "StackTrace: ".  Utility::getStackTrace($e); //not working

}

?>

Responses[9]

Posted by Robert Sinner on January 30, 2008 7:11:00 PM PST #