PHP

Support for dealing with encrypted SOAP messages was a feature that had been missing from my WS-* libraries pretty much due to my lack of time to implement it. When people ask for help interoperating with a SOAP server that requires encryption I typically just point them over to the WSF project. The problem has been that in many cases people are unable to install that framework, as they don't control the servers, or more recently I have gotten reports that they simply could not get it to work. Either it didn't support what they needed, wouldn't compile, or simple wouldn't work with even simple SOAP requests. I decided to finally set aside some time and implement the encryption/decryption portion of the library. Note that it was developed against some WCF services implementing message level security, so your mileage might vary against other platforms. Bug reports would be fastest way of getting any of those issues dealt with.

As part of the recent changes, I also finally got around to creating an official project for the libraries rather than just being ad-hoc files people pulled from my web site. The libraries are now officially part of the wse-php project hosted over at Google Code. It was a toss up between that and GitHub, but I really wanted to play around with Mercurial since I already use Git over at the Gnome project. Currently the libraries provide support for a portion of WS-Addressing and WS-Security that can be used with ext/soap in PHP. As time goes on I plan to add some support for simplified configuration of messaging as well as some other of the WS-* specs that might be useful when interoperating with other SOAP servers.

After quite some time, version 1.2.2 has finally been released. It can be downloaded at: http://xmlseclibs.googlecode.com/files/xmlseclibs-1.2.2.tar.gz

Changes include:

Features:
- Add support XPath support when creating signature. Provides support for
working with EBXML documents.
- Add reference option to force creation of URI attribute. For use
when adding a DOM Document where by default no URI attribute is added.
- Add support for RSA-SHA256

Bug Fixes:
- fix bug #5: createDOMDocumentFragment() in decryptNode when data is node
content (patch by Francois Wang)

Please submit any bugs or feature requests into the Issue Tracker.

Slides have been posted for the latest version of my Digital Identity talk.

The contents is a bit less technical than in the past and is aimed at wider audience than just developers. Please contact me if there are any questions on the material or topics presented. Rob Richards.

You can also find the slides from my OAuth presentation.

Another php|tek has come and gone. Although a bit behind, I finally got my slides online for my Streaming XML talk. I lingered a little too long on a few topics so the XMLWriter portion was a bit rushed. If anyone has questions on any of the topics, feel free to drop me a line. I did promise a few people I would write a bit about XMLReader and XMLWriter, but it's slow going as I try to find the time. Hopefully in the not to distant future I can get to this. This Dad thing is really time consuming

As many people have found out, entity handling in ext/xml is broken when used with libxml2 2.7.0-2.7.2. The problem lies with the way pre-defined entities are handled; or rather not handled when used with one of the newer libxml2 versions. The entities, &, < , >, ' and " never get passed to the user's callbacks, causing a big problem in quite a number of applications out there. Needless to say, I've received a good amount of hate mail over this problem. Got to love people. You never hear how grateful anyone ever is, but sure as hell once there is a problem they are all over you. Anyways, I digress.

Although I have been telling people for a few years now that they should use XMLReader rather than ext/xml, this breakage was not intentional; no matter what anyone says – Yes, I've had a few throw that out there. The good news is that the problem has finally been fixed, but will require both an updated PHP (5.2.9+) and libxml2-2.7.3, although none of them have yet been released. Until things are available, the available options are to either compile your own builds using the code from the libxml2 and PHP repositories, don't upgrade to libxml2 2.7.x yet if you haven't yet done so, build ext/xml with expat rather than libxml2, or lastly, convert your PHP code to use XMLReader.

My parting thought on this to everyone is just switch to the XMLReader extension. It's faster, easier to use and much more powerful.

Slides have been posted for the latest version of my Digital Identity talk.

This talk has evolved since I first starting giving it, but the latest version simple needed more time to present. I was asked to combine all the topics (OAuth was to be its own presentation) into one, which I probably won't do again. Even just only covering the absolute basics, I found that there just isn't enough time to cover them all in the short amount of time, so some material was skimmed over. If anyone has any questions on any of the material, please feel free to contact me.

I had a good number of requests for write-ups of the material I presented in the Streaming XML session, so will try to put something together over the next couple of days. The session went over by just a bit so if I missed addressing any questions, please feel free to email me with them.

Working with Web Services
Who Am I?
Streaming XML

2008 is sure off to a lousy start. I went back to work the first work day of the new year after some relaxing time off just to be told the entire IT department has been let go effective immediately. I am just praying this isn't an indication about how the rest of the year is going to go. I get enough of the open position emails, but the trouble is that I am not going to leave Maine. I like it here and it's a great place to raise a family. That being said, if anyone is looking or knows of someone looking for a developer in Maine (I'm trying to avoid doing Java full time) or that allows for a full time telecommuter, I would appreciate any leads: You either already have my email address or contact me via: =rob.richards.

As far as outside projects I am involved in and work on, I do plan on continuing working on them, although I might be a bit MIA for some time until I get settled. My apologies for tagging this in all categories, but hey I need to get maximum exposure here.

The other day, in my review of PHP Oracle Web Development, I mentioned that I was having problems enabling the oracle extension on Fedora 8. I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off enough to spend some time getting it resolved. Hopefully this helps anyone else having the same problem. I am currently using instant client 11.1, but I did try the 10.2 version with the same results. I assume that the steps I went through to get it working are the same for that version as well (other than the different directory). Anyways, the issue was a bit strange. When trying to run the configure script, I would receive the error:
cannot compute sizeof char*

This would only happen when the oracle extension (ext/oci8 or ext/pdo-oci) was enabled. So I started poking around the config.log and the oracle m4 file. The first thing I noticed was that libaio was missing. Having become so used to rpms detailing their dependencies (and the intstant client installing without issue), I hadn't realized that the instant client needed this lib. After a quick, yum install libaio, I tried again, yet still hit the same issue.

The good folks from Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a few books to review and I've been a little lax posting a review, so over the next few days I hope to have them all up. Overall I would have to say that PHP Oracle Web Development is a good book for a PHP developer needing to get up to speed quickly working with an Oracle database. I've worked with Oracle before using other languages, but never with PHP. I found the chapters progressed through the various topics in a logical and straightforward manner. It was easily to follow along, of course coding as you go, and easy to understand what was going on.

There were some features that, prior to this, I hadn't used before, such as their native XML support. Lately, I have been using DB2 and XQuery and was both surprised and glad to find the book cover some of this. Again, easy to understand and follow. After about 15 minutes, I was doing all sorts of crazy XML operations within Oracle.

The only place I found the book lacking was the initial setup of the environment. This is definitely a minor nit, but something that was a bit frustrating until I got it all working. The book tends to favor a Windows installation, which usually is simple anyways. I decided, however, to install on my linux box. The missing step came when I was trying to configure the oci8 extension in PHP. I was not using the instant client and had not setup the environment, so things weren't found. After checking the oci8 config.m4 in PHP, I found it was looking for ORACLE_HOME. A little searching and I found that all I needed was to execute a shell command (included in the Oracle install) to have them properly setup:
/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh

After that, install went smoothly. Now, the only other issue I am having is trying to configure PHP to work on my Fedora 8 system using the 11.1 instant client. The configure script (using PHP 5.2 from CVS that does support this Oracle version) doesn't like it for some reason. Something to work on another day.

All in all, I would definitely recommend this book, PHP Oracle Web Development, to a PHP developer needing to learn or at least have a reference book on integrating with Oracle.

Updated 12/19/2007: I finally resolved the instant client issue on Fedora 8. Also fixed my typos :/