I am designing an enterprise security server for our company – we own many different applications, most written in java and a few written in PHP. I could provide a remote API that would give each application access to the server. I could also create ‘agents’ that each application could include that would do all the work for them, but allow my server control over their sessions and thus their authentications/authorizations. Issue is I would probably be better to write the agent in java because 80% or more of our apps are in java.
If I wrote the agent in java does anyone know if there was a way this program could access the php session? If not does anyone have a suggestion regarding a better way to go about doing this?
The session data is stored as a (php) serialized array in a temporary folder. The locations for these are set in the php.ini file.
But you can change both the format of the data and the place it is stored (e.g. to a database or shared memory or somewhere else) by writing your own handler.
A quick google suggests that several people have written [de]serializers in Java for PHP data. e.g. http://hurring.com/scott/code/java/serialize/
If you have problems with the built-in PHP serialize function – have a google for WDDX (which IIRC comes as standard) and serializes data into XML.
You might want to think about how you keep the session data appearing to be active to PHP if you want the agent to continue independently of the web session.
C.