Remote Data and HTTP Response

[Shymus Roffo]

i have been experimenting with these two events and wondering if there are better alternatives to remote data with PHP functions... I am begining to learn php and i do not know how to send http requests and wanted to know how to do it...XML-RPC is a pain to figure out and remember.. If you can please help.

[Darkie Minotaur]

You want an HTTP request from a webserver to SL? Or a request from SL to a webserver?

[Shymus Roffo]

webserver to SL

[Sassy Romano]

one of your big potential challenges is that many hosting companies block the required inbound TCP port to SL.  It's 12046 if I remember correctly, check but that would cause you much frustration if your code was correct and nothing happened.

[Darkie Minotaur]

Sassy points out an important point. Not too many hosting providers allow outward communication on odd ports.

Apart from that, you'll find a simple example (LSL and PHP) at  the ende of this page, that you can try out and study.

[Shymus Roffo]

How can i figure out what ports are avaliable to me from the hosting company? do i have to contact the company or can i just use phpinfo() ?

[Shymus Roffo]

i also have managed to get XML-RPC to send data but i was told that there is an easier way without have to use remote data and could use http response instead.

[Sassy Romano]

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shymus Roffo wrote:

How can i figure out what ports are avaliable to me from the hosting company? do i have to contact the company or can i just use phpinfo() ?

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You can just try your code and if you think it will work see what happens, or you could just ask the hosting company if they restrict outbound connections on ports other than port 80 (or any others)

[Darkie Minotaur]

Actually, there are at least 3 points of failure:

• fsock isn't enabled - you can see that in the phpinfo() 
• the port is blocked - the request will time out
• you provided a wrong url for the LSL script in your php script - you'll get an error message in the webpage (in the example I pointed to) that the cap wasn't found. This at least means, the port is open

[Sassy Romano]

Darkie now raises another fun point and that's when a prim with a script gets a URL, that URL is valid until the script resets or the object is re-rezzed OR the region restarts.

Region restarts need to be handled if you expect your web host to send data to the inworld prim at any point as it will need a current URL.

Similarly, if the prim happens to be a worn item such as a hud, you'll need to handle the rez situation on region change or teleport.

It's all fun!

[Shymus Roffo]

Ok i was planning on using it as a server so people can browse a store on a website or pick an item from it and have it delivered to them in world. so far it works.

[Sassy Romano]

Ah well in that case, you might be able to be a bit clever and not get into difficulty with initiating outbound communications.

Depending on how you do it, your web browser can make the request to the inworld delivery server and that won't have any ports restricted.  You would need to have appropriate security controls in place though with this model to avoid any vulnerabilities that permitted someone to run local scripts in a browser that then commanded a delivery server to hand out free products and i'm not saying it's the best model, just something that you *might* be able to work with if blocked ports is an issue.

[Talia Davidov]

if you need to work around the changing URL that Sassy pointed out a couple of posts ago, there is a workaround I posted in this thread about using a third party service to keep the location of your inworld prim up to date.  Not sure it would be needed in your case since the inworld server communicates to the out of world server first if I am following correctly.  But just in case there it is.

[Sassy Romano]

If it's a vending solution then at some point it will be making a call from the webhost to the inworld delivery server.  Given that it only has to communicate with those (by the sound of it), there's only a need to maintain a sql table of a handful of delivery servers so shouldn't be a problem to update those when the URL changes.  There'll be a database anyway so all good as far as I can see.

[Talia Davidov]

*Nods . . .Sounded like that to me too, but thought it wouldn't hurt to post the other.

[Shymus Roffo]

its not really like a vendor, It is a box that holds stuff for a roleplay store. and you can use virutal roleplay money to purchase stuff in the store.