Calling a DLL with PHP

So here’s a quick post on calling dll’s in Windows using php. I have a dll that encrypts data in a certain format that we need for another process. So I need to pass the dll a string and it returns the encrypted string back.

I tried calling the dll using the COM class in code and was having issues until I realized I have to register the dll in windows first before I can call it using the COM class. To register a dll in windows you do the following in your command line:

REGSVR32 MyStuff.dll

Now that the dll is registered you can do the following to start accessing the dll:

$my_dll = new COM('MyStuff.Functions');

MyStuff is the dll name an/or id and Functions is the object inside the dll that we want to use. Now I call the method I need and pass the parameters:

$encrypted_text = null;
$input = 'This needs to be encrypted.';
$my_dll->EncryptString($input, $encrypted_text );

This is pretty much it. We instantiate the COM class with the dll and function I want. Then I call the method in the dll passing my text and it returns into my $encrypted_text var the encrypted text. I can now do my next process with the encrypted text like:

print $encrypted_text;

Dynamic PHP Images Tutorial

So I decided to play around with creating a dynamic php image to see how much work was involved and it’s actually pretty easy to do. In my case I wanted to solve the following problem.

I have a trip planned for a weekend coming up and I keep wanting to see what the weather is going to be like for that weekend. It seems everyday the weather.com forecast changes so I keep checking it on a daily basis. My options are

  1. go to the weather.com website, search for the zip code, then select view 10 day forecast or 
  2. create a quick and easy automated way of looking for this information as a graphic. 

Of course, I picked the latter. Here’s what we are about to create:


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