BP202 - IBM Lotus Domino and PHP, Let's All Work Together
This year I'm assigned as a room monitor in the afternoon. This limits my ability to select sessions I want to visit. On the other hand I'll see topics I wouldn't have considered. PHP wasn't on my radar. To run PHP you can download a LAMP or WAMP package that installs everything ready to go in a single installer. You also can get bits and pieces yourself that will take about two to three days to understand all this. Of course you simply can sign-up for a PHP hosting package. The sites demonstrated used cPanel and Fantastico, which is a ready made set of scripts. The presenters walked us through the various applications that are included in the script collection. The advantage of PHP is not the language itself but the gazillions of ready made scripts that you can use at your convenience.
So the big question is: when would you use PHP and Domino together: in a nutshell if there are ready made components PHP seems to be a valid option. Of course you need to consider a lot of stuff: where will the stuff live, how much data gets passed back and forth and is single sign-on needed. The session went on to discuss the if you should have one or two servers. Instead of theoretically musing about that, they showed this using a few demos. Two boxes is pretty straight forward. A single server requires to configure Domino to run on a different port (81) and use Apache's mod_rewrite.
They then went on and discussed how PHP and Domino can share data. Suitable methods could be HTTP, ODBC and ADO (this one is Microsoft only). Again they used ample examples that illustrated their points. ODBC and ADO seem to be limited to Windows and the HTTP example used Windows only (XMLHttp Object) too.
Next topic was the concepts you can use to implement Single Sign on. A bit fluffy here. But see for yourself.
What I liked
Good overview why you want or don't want to mix the two environments.
What I didn't like
Code examples for HTTP were windows only.
So the big question is: when would you use PHP and Domino together: in a nutshell if there are ready made components PHP seems to be a valid option. Of course you need to consider a lot of stuff: where will the stuff live, how much data gets passed back and forth and is single sign-on needed. The session went on to discuss the if you should have one or two servers. Instead of theoretically musing about that, they showed this using a few demos. Two boxes is pretty straight forward. A single server requires to configure Domino to run on a different port (81) and use Apache's mod_rewrite.
They then went on and discussed how PHP and Domino can share data. Suitable methods could be HTTP, ODBC and ADO (this one is Microsoft only). Again they used ample examples that illustrated their points. ODBC and ADO seem to be limited to Windows and the HTTP example used Windows only (XMLHttp Object) too.
Next topic was the concepts you can use to implement Single Sign on. A bit fluffy here. But see for yourself.
What I liked
Good overview why you want or don't want to mix the two environments.
What I didn't like
Code examples for HTTP were windows only.
Posted by Stephan H Wissel on 21 January 2007 | Comments (4) | categories: Lotusphere