This allows you to generate XML using PHP.

This is very much a WIP, but hopefully it will be assimilated into the "real" docs – TonyCollen

Part of the problem is that the PHP docs concerning compiling --with-servlet are not very clear. Hopefully this document will clear up some of the confusion.

This process was done on a Debian Linux 3.0r0 system and a CVS checkout of Cocoon-2.1dev

From the $php_src/sapi/servlet/README:

_

  Introduction

    The Java Servlet SAPI Module allows for the execution of PHP 4 as
    a Servlet from within a Java Servlet Engine, such as Apache's
    Jakarta Tomcat. It builds upon the mechanism defined by PHP's
    Java Extension, which can be found in /php4/ext/java.

    The primary advantage of this from a PHP perspective is that web
    servers which support servlets typically take great care in
    pooling and reusing Java Virtual Machines (JVMs).

    PHP may also be bridged with the Apache Cocoon XML Publishing
    Framework.

    A suitably configured system will invoke the PHP binaries through
    JNI and the output of the page will be processed through the
    configured XML parser and placed into the pipeline for processing
    by such filters as XSLT. This enables PHP developers to access the
    powers of Cocoon to separate their content, style, and logic
    without requiring them to write a single line of Java code.

    While this code is intended to be able to run on any servlet
    engine, it has only been tested on Apache's Jakarta Tomcat to
    date. Bug reports, success stories and/or patches required to get
    this code to run on other engines would be appreciated; please
    send them to the PHP Development Mailinglist.

_

$ ls -l /usr/local/java
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     staff          13 Oct 22 11:04 /usr/local/java -> j2sdk1.4.1_01

$ tar zxvf php-4.2.3.tar.gz
php-4.2.3/
php-4.2.3/build/

<snip/>

$ cd php-4.2.3
php-4.2.3$ ./configure --with-servlet --with-java=/usr/local/java

<snip/>

checking for Java support... yes

<this-finishes/>

*Make sure javac is in your $PATH, otherwise the next command will fail.

Your Java installation also needs to know about javax.servlet.* or else it will fail as well.

You can do the following command (assuming your shell is bash) to add this package to your $CLASSPATH if you don't have javax.servlet.* installed system-wide:*

php-4.2.3$ export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/local/tomcat/common/lib/servlet.jar

php-4.2.3$ make
Making all in Zend

<php-compiles/>

Next, you need to put the generated phpsrvlt.jar file (It's located in $php_src_dir/sapi/servlet/) into xml-cocoon2/lib/local and recompile Cocoon. When you run build, it will automagically detect the presence of the .jar file and additionally compile the PHP Generator.

After you have Cocoon deployed and running, make sure the following generator is added to your sitemap:

<map:generator logger="sitemap.generator.php" 
     name="php" 
     pool-grow="2" 
     pool-max="32" 
     pool-min="4" 
     src="org.apache.cocoon.generation.PhpGenerator"/>

and then use it like so:

<map:match pattern="test.php">
   <map:generate type="php" src="documents/test.php"/>
   <map:transform src="stylesheets/simple-page2html.xsl"/>
   <map:serialize type="html"/>
</map:match>

test.php would look something like this:

<?php 

   print "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n";

   print "<page>\n";
   print "<title>Hello world from PHP</title>\n";
   print "<content>\n";
   print "<para>This is my page being dynamically generated using a PhpGenerator</para>\n";
   print "</content>\n";
   print "</page>\n";
?>

Hit http://localhost:8080/cocoon/test.php and you should have your page! Obviously, just printing XML from PHP is a little stupid, so this would be very useful if you wanted to use the myriad of other ways that PHP can generate data (Database, etc). Then again, if you're generating XML from a database, consider using SpecificDatabaseConnection that Cocoon can connect to a database.

If you already have a PHP script that generates XML, the PHPGenerator is a good way of migrating functionality to Cocoon from a LAMP-type setup.

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