PHP Extension for Oracle BRM

Those who develop libraries and features for third-party applications have already experienced the increased difficulty of the learning curve that this brings to our work.

My specialty for over 20 years has always been backend processing using the C/C++ language, although I started my career as a fullstack developer using the old Clipper. And even today, I demand of myself as a developer, at least the ability to develop a fully functional application from the client interface to server processing.

Further on classic HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, etc., to help me with the task of integrating all of this, I chose PHP because of its versatility, its vast library of extensions and APIs and its gentle learning curve.

One of the challenges of working with Oracle BRM is communicating with it. In addition to the learning curve to understand its functional aspects, the developer will still have to deal with the technical aspects from flists, classes, objects to custom opcodes and MTAs, to then be able to understand what and how to request something from BRM.

Now, the next step is which language to choose to communicate with BRM, and that's it. There is no choice. You only have Java. And of course, you will have to disregard Perl with Perl::CGI for frontend processes if you consider that the language is discontinued and has been maintained by the developer community (however it is a very useful language for developing small batch processes in place of traditional shell scripts).

I understand that Java is superior to PHP in terms of efficiency and scalability. However, its implementation costs are much higher when compared to PHP, if we consider lower or medium flow CRUD tasks.

Due to the need to create my own customizations and test them, I started creating the extension in PHP (since it is programmed in C) thinking of an easier way to communicate with BRM, even if initially, calling an opcode by its number, sending a flist in string, to receive the return in an xml string, and it worked.

Since then I have made improvements to implement more functions and definitions, achieving excellent results. That's why I decided to share a first beta version for those who want to try it.

Download and Wiki Page

https://github.com/cassiobj/PHP-PCM-Client_7.5_lib

Software Requirements

Oracle Linux 7.5 to 7.9 with Oracle BRM 7.5 PCM libs installed.

PHP 7.3 to 8.2

Apache 2.4 (if you want to run PHP within a browser). I haven't tested it with Nginx, but I don't see any obstacles to using it.