Question

Basically i have these two pages… each with a string that i get with a minecraft bukkit plugin. I need to know if its possible that i can change the String in the index.php file which sits on a web server using java methods. Basically I’m too lazy to edit the files every time i release a update to my plugin. To get more info on what I’m talking about…. http://updates.milkycraft.net/ – for the version. The source code of my plugin can be found at http://github.com/milkywayz/entitymanager/. I would probably just want to create a separate java application with swing and have that update the values. The index.php file for both strings are extremely simple, i just declared a string variable then echo’d it.

Answer 1

Of course you could change the PHP file, but it’s not the best solution – it would be really error-prone. There is an other alternative: write the data to the separate file in a well-known format (XML, JSON, YAML, INI etc.) and let the PHP script read it.

Map<String, String> data = new HashMap<String, String>();
data.put("a", "value a");
data.put("b", "value b");
data.put("c", "value c");

// Convert a Map to JSON using GSON:
String data = new Gson().toJson(data);

// Write data to the file:
BufferedWriter writer = null;

try {
    writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("/path/to/file"));
    writer.write(data);
    writer.flush();
} catch ( ... ) {
   ...
} finally {
    if (writer != null) {
        writer.close();
    }
}

// Read the data
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents('/path/to/file'));

print_r($data);