Integrating web services into Actinic

[dcrocker]

Hi all,

We run an online shop using Actinic v7 and need to integrate some web services into it to send and receive data from a third party music publisher (we sell sheet music online).

The shop needs to send out XML messages every time a customer orders, and at various other times. We also need to import our entire product catalogue directly from these XML web services.

Questions are:

1) Would you write the web services in Perl or PHP? I believe PHP is better for this kind of thing, and I also work for an IT company which could do the coding in PHP but not Perl.

If we used PHP classes how would you call the PHP from within Actinic? Presumably we would have to embed the PHP calls within the relevant Perl scripts and pass the Actinic data to PHP?

2) Would it be better to keep the whole thing in Perl?

3) Has anyone successfully got web services working in Actinic like this?

Any ideas welcome

Many thanks

[Mike Hughes]

My thoughts on this would be:

1. Do it in PHP.

It'll be easier to develop and maintain.

2. Use the session file as the source of the order data.

IIRC there's a bit of perl that goes through and deletes the session files once an order has been completed. This routine could be changed to give the session file a new name (such as NewOrderxxxx.abc) rather than delete it.

3. Then you just need to trigger the PHP.

Depending on how quickly you need the xml sent, you could trigger this from the perl or just run the php every 10 minutes and look for new order files.

Mike

[dcrocker]

Thanks Mike, I think PHP would be easier as well. Interesting to know about the session file, I'm sure we can make use of that somehow.

I will keep digging away on how to trigger the PHP from within the Perl scripts. Some of what we need could be done in a CRON job every 5 mins say, but some is realtime as well.

Cheers,
Des