README

Fast and flexible HTTP client for PHP 5.2+.

Motivation

Today we can choose from a number of excellent HTTP client libraries for PHP. However, they all assume a particular configuration of the underlying PHP installation. e.g. Guzzle requires cURL. This presents a problem if you want to ship code that can be run on an arbitrary PHP server.

shortstop mitigates this problem by dynamically selecting the best underlying HTTP mechanism for the server's environment. As a result, shortstop works on virtually any PHP 5.2+ installation.

Features

• Compatible with PHP 5.2+
• Supports cURL, PHP's HTTP extension, fsockopen(), fopen(), and streams
• HTTP 1.0 only (for now!)
• Strong support for HTTP content compression. Exact mechanism (deflate, gzip, etc) determined by server environment
• Built-in chunked-transfer decoding
• Highly configurable and extensible via an event dispatcher compatible with Symfony's event dispatcher
• Heavily tested with excellent code coverage

Usage

As you can see below, the trade-off for all the flexibility of stash is that assembling the components can be quite verbose. Using an inversion-of-control container can help, as the actual client can be reused as a singleton. If, however, you'd like to use stash on its own then you can follow the code below.

//build an event dispatcher
$eventDispatcher = new ehough_tickertape_EventDispatcher();  //implements ehough_tickertape_EventDispatcherInterface

//build an HTTP message parser
$httpMessageParser = new ehough_shortstop_impl_exec_DefaultHttpMessageParser();

//build a chain of HTTP transport mechanisms
$chain = new ehough_chaingang_impl_StandardChain();
$chain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_exec_command_CurlCommand($httpMessageParser, $eventDispatcher));
$chain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_exec_command_ExtCommand($httpMessageParser, $eventDispatcher));
$chain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_exec_command_FopenCommand($httpMessageParser, $eventDispatcher));
$chain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_exec_command_FsockOpenCommand($httpMessageParser, $eventDispatcher));
$chain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_exec_command_StreamsCommand($httpMessageParser, $eventDispatcher));

//build the HTTP client
$client = new ehough_shortstop_impl_DefaultHttpClient($eventDispatcher, $chain);

//build a chain of HTTP content decoders
$contentDecodingChain = new ehough_chaingang_impl_StandardChain();
$contentDecodingChain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_decoding_content_command_NativeGzipDecompressingCommand());
$contentDecodingChain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_decoding_content_command_SimulatedGzipDecompressingCommand());
$contentDecodingChain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_decoding_content_command_NativeDeflateRfc1950DecompressingCommand());
$contentDecodingChain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_decoding_content_command_NativeDeflateRfc1951DecompressingCommand());

//build an HTTP content decoder
$httpContentDecoder = new ehough_shortstop_impl_decoding_content_HttpContentDecodingChain($contentDecodingChain);

//add some HTTP request listeners
$eventDispatcher->addListener(ehough_shortstop_api_Events::REQUEST,
    array(new ehough_shortstop_impl_listeners_request_RequestDefaultHeadersListener($httpContentDecoder), 'onPreRequest'));
$eventDispatcher->addListener(ehough_shortstop_api_Events::REQUEST,
    array(new ehough_shortstop_impl_listeners_request_RequestLoggingListener(), 'onPreRequest'));

//build a chain of HTTP transport decoders
$transferDecodingChain = new ehough_chaingang_impl_StandardChain();
$transferDecodingChain->addCommand(new ehough_shortstop_impl_decoding_transfer_command_ChunkedTransferDecodingCommand());

//build an HTTP transport decoder
$httpTransferDecoder = new ehough_shortstop_impl_decoding_transfer_HttpTransferDecodingChain($transferDecodingChain);

//add some HTTP response listeners
$eventDispatcher->addListener(ehough_shortstop_api_Events::RESPONSE,
    array(new ehough_shortstop_impl_listeners_response_ResponseDecodingListener($httpTransferDecoder, 'Transfer'), 'onResponse'));
$eventDispatcher->addListener(ehough_shortstop_api_Events::RESPONSE,
    array(new ehough_shortstop_impl_listeners_response_ResponseDecodingListener($httpContentDecoder, 'Content'), 'onResponse'));
$eventDispatcher->addListener(ehough_shortstop_api_Events::RESPONSE,
    array(new ehough_shortstop_impl_listeners_response_ResponseLoggingListener(), 'onResponse'));

//build a new HTTP request
$request = new ehough_shortstop_api_HttpRequest('GET', 'https://github.com/');

//execute the request
$response = $client->execute($request);

$status = $response->getStatusCode();    //e.g. 200

$entity = $response->getEntity();        // instance of ehough_shortstop_api_HttpEntity
$type   = $entity->getContentType();     // e.g. text/html
$body   = $entity->getContent();         // the actual body of the response