How to access a binary file

Anon

Hi everyone !

I have a major problem. Hope you can help me.

My company has a tool that creates ASP code from a wizard process that the user defines the following parameters:
-> which database to connect and the apropriate command to use
-> the type of page to be created (search page, fill in page)

We are going to create a version for this tool to generate PHP code.
My first problem is that this tool uses a DLL in the code it generates. I know PHP doesn´t support the use of DLL´s. So I was thinking of converting the DLL code to a include file in PHP, but it has to be protected because the user who is going to use this tool must not see the code of this include. Any ideas how this can be done ?

Thanks in advance

Raphael

Anon

Hi!

If you make an iclude file with php extention and that extention (obviously) is server-parsed by PHP, malicious users will never be able to see the source, all they will see is output. And if this include contains only a class declaration or a bunch of functions without calls to functions in the global namespace, they won't see anything at all. Besides, they probably won't be able even to guess the name of the file.
On WinNT, you can indeed call COM methods from PHP, but not on Apache. I recommend you to make a PHP version of the code because this solves the problem with portability. But if you are going to host on WindowsNT, you will be better off calling the DLL directly via COM functions that are built into PHP.

Don't make the include with extension inc as it is often not configured as a server parsed extention by default (you can change that by editing the .htaccess or other web server configuration files easily though).

Hope it helps,
Best,
Stas

Anon

You mean users through internet, right ?

The problem is that this PHP page will not be hosted on my company´s server. It will be hosted on our clients server and we don´t want our clients to see the content of the include file.

And yes, it will be hosted on Linux so we can´t use the COM functions you mentioned.

Thanks anyway.

Raphael