PHP With COM and/or DOTNET

[DaveSawers]

Does anyone here have experience with using COM or DOTNET objects within PHP?

If I go to the PHP Manual and try the examples there for using COM and DOTNET from PHP then I can (for example): fire up Word on the server, create a document, write it, save it and quit the application.

Now we have written a .NET application to run as a server to another program and I have the following problems with it.

Instantiating the application using new COM(...) doesn't work.

If the application is manually started up on the server then get_active_object(...) returns an object but doesn't allow me to do anything with it.

Trying to instantiate the object using new DOTNET(...) crashes Apache!

The PHP manual is not very helpful about how to sort this kind of problem and neither is Microsoft any help.

Any ideas? Any thought as to how I can find out what's wrong?

[DaveSawers]

Some progress...

I can now instantiate the object on the server using new COM(...) and as long as I have instantiated it, I can use get_active_object(...) to attach to it. I can even run some methods ofthe object and although they don't crash, they don't seem to do anything either.

However, the object doesn't appear on the screen of the server computer or, as far as I can see, in the task list of Task Manager.

When run manually on the server, the application opens up its control window and runs scripts, as it is designed to do.

Most frustrating...

[able]

PHP's com support is as you've discovered painfully bad.

If you've got a wrapper in .net - could you possibly just expose it as soap? If its viable, you wont have many problems from php.

Additionally if you grab the zend php for eclipse trial, it's got a wsdl parser that'll generate your php stubs to save you some work.