Question

I would like to write an adapter for PHP for the binary API of OrientDB.

But I need a bit of help from someone who has experience with raw socket communications in PHP – I can’t seem to even get past the first hurdle of connecting PHP to OrientDB.

I would appreciate it if someone experience with sockets would take a look at this:

http://code.google.com/p/orient/issues/detail?id=126

If we could get past the first hurdle and actually send a packet (simplified examples at the bottom of that page – please scroll down to the end), I could certainly write the adapter.

And if I do, this would of course be released as open source.

Hoping someone can help me get started?

Thanks!

---

11/20/2010

Referencing PEAR’s Net_Socket, I ended up with essentially the same code I attempted early on, using fsockopen() and the regular PHP stream-functions.

Still I got nowhere. The server does not react at all, and even with a 5 second timeout set, the script just goes into deep sleep, and doesn’t come out until the general PHP script time limit is surpassed.

Here’s the code:

<?php

header('Content-type: text/plain');

error_reporting(E_ALL | E_NOTICE | E_WARNING);

$txid = 123;
$db = 'demo';
$username = 'writer';
$password = 'writer';

$packet = "\x05". # 1 byte
  pack('i',$txid). # 4 bytes
  pack('i',strlen($db)).$db. # string
  pack('i',strlen($username)).$username. # string
  pack('i',strlen($password)).$password; # string

hex_dump($packet);

$addr = '127.0.0.1';
$port = 2424;
$timeout = 5;
$errstr = '';
$errno = 0;

$socket = fsockopen($addr, $port, $errno, $errstr, $timeout);

stream_set_blocking($socket, 1);

socket_set_timeout($socket, $timeout);

var_dump($socket);

fwrite($socket, $packet);

$response = '';
while (!feof($socket))
  $response .= fread($socket, 1024);

hex_dump($response);

fclose($socket);

And here’s the hex_dump() function I’m using to inspect the packet I’m submitting:

<?php

function hex_dump($data, $newline="\n")
{
  static $from = '';
  static $to = '';

  static $width = 16; # number of bytes per line

  static $pad = '.'; # padding for non-visible characters

  if ($from==='')
  {
    for ($i=0; $i<=0xFF; $i++)
    {
      $from .= chr($i);
      $to .= ($i >= 0x20 && $i <= 0x7E) ? chr($i) : $pad;
    }
  }

  $hex = str_split(bin2hex($data), $width*2);
  $chars = str_split(strtr($data, $from, $to), $width);

  $offset = 0;
  foreach ($hex as $i => $line)
  {
    echo sprintf('%6X',$offset).' : '.implode(' ', str_split($line,2)) . ' [' . $chars[$i] . ']' . $newline;
    $offset += $width;
  }
}

According to Luca Garulli, the author of OrientDB, the packet I’m submitting looks right. So something else is amiss…

Could this be a Windows issue? I’m using PHP 5.3 on Windows, under Apache…

Answer 1

Actually, I forget what precisely the issue was – but I did get it working.

If anyone else needs to see a working implementation (whether for OrientDB or something else) feel free to take a look at the public repository here:

https://github.com/mindplay-dk/OrientDB-PHP