COM support on Windows Page 5

By ServerWatch Staff (Send Email)
Sep 7, 2000

- Digg
- DZone
- Reddit
- Slashdot
- StumbleUpon
- del.icio.us
- Facebook
- FriendFeed
- Furl

On Windows platforms, PHP4 now offers support for COM components. This means that practically all Windows applications can be manipulated from PHP4. The COM model at the heart of Microsoft's architecture is such that any Windows application can provide a certain number of components and exposed methods, which are entry points for manipulating applications from other applications.

A few lines of code tend to be more useful than a long description, so let's examine the following example. The code below does nothing less than boot Word, create a new document from it, add text to this document, and then save everything on the disk before quitting.

<?php
$word = new COM("word.application") or
die("Impossible to instantiate WordApp");
print "Word is running, version {$word->Version}\n</br>";

$word->Visible=1;

$word->Documents->Add();
$word->Selection->TypeText("This is a test..."); $word->Documents[1]->SaveAs("test_com_php.doc"); $word->Quit();
?>

Page 5 of 9