Question

I am creating a web front end for clients to download their reports. The program that the company uses is written in Java and consists of 31 mysql tables with the 4 reports needed having over 140 points of data each. I am making the website in PHP and report generator in Java but I am having an issue finding the information on how to get the in memory PDF to load directly in the clients browser. I figured on using a TCP client/server going from Java to PHP but how do I code it so that it doesn’t have to be written to the server drive and be supplied as a link. I also have no wish to rewrite 17,000 lines of Java to PHP as I am new to PHP. Is there anyway to get this done?
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Depending on how long the java app would take to run, you could consider using proc_open to create a pipe to the java programme:

<?php
    $desc = array(array('pipe','r'),array('pipe','w'));
    $resource= proc_open('bash',$desc,$pipes);
    if (!is_resource($resource))
    {
        throw new Exception('PDF stream creation failed');
    }
    usleep(5);//for safety
    fwrite($pipes[0],'java mkPDF paras'."\n");//double quoted \n is crucial
    fclose($pipes[0]);
    usleep(100);//while java app is running;
    $pdf = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
    fclose($pipes[1]);
    proc_close($resource);
?>

This is just a basic example, that gets the streamed pdf in one big lump, so it’s far from perfect. What you -IMO- should look into is getting the stream in chunks using a while loop. The php man page contains a couple of examples of this, basically, repleace

usleep(100);//while java app is running;
$pdf = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);

with:

usleep(10);//while java app is running;
$pdf = '';
while (($pdfBuff = fgets($pipes[1],1024)) !== null)
{
    $pdf.=$pdfBuff;//or echo, or whatever
}
fclose($pipes[1]);

The latter is untested, so I’m not sure if that will work in your case… but you get the idea