Paul M. Jones

As I noted in an earlier post, Solar how has classes to represent simple HTTP requests and responses.

Solar_Http_Request

The Solar_Http_Request class represents a standalone HTTP request (i.e., it’s not an HTTP client, just a request). It uses adapters, so you can (in the future) change between a cURL, pecl_http, or sockets adapter – but for now, the only adapter is the streams-based one.

It’s a fluent class, which makes the code a little prettier at times. Here’s a basic GET request that sends “?foo=bar” as the query string.

$request = Solar::factory('Solar_Http_Request');
$request->setUri('http://example.com/index.php')
        ->setContent(array('foo' => 'bar'));

$response = $request->fetch();

(You could also set the query string in the URI if you wanted, but using setContent() does all the esaping for you.)

Here’s the same thing as a POST:

$request = Solar::factory('Solar_Http_Request');

$request->setUri('http://example.com/index.php')
        ->setContent(array('foo' => 'bar'))
        ->setMethod('post');

$response = $request->fetch();

And here’s a request with a lot of customization:

$request = Solar::factory('Solar_Http_Request');

$request->setUri('http://example.com/index.php')
        ->setMethod('post')
        ->setHeader('X-Zim', 'Kneel before Zim!')
        ->setUserAgent('Irken Robot Gir')
        ->setBasicAuth('username', 'password')
        ->setContent(array('foo' => 'bar'));

$response = $request->fetch();

Right now, Solar_Http_Request doesn’t handle file uploads, but that functionality is planned for a future release. However, it does provide SSL support through PHP streams.

Solar_Http_Response

What you get back from the request is a Solar_Http_Response object. You can explore the response by getting the response code, response text, HTTP version, headers, cookies, and content – all pretty standard stuff.

You can also build a new Solar_Http_Response on your own and send that from your application. This has the benefit of giving you relatively good control over headers, response codes, etc., so that you can pass the values around to different parts of your application before sending the final response. (It also sanitizes header values automatically, which can be a nice addition for secure coding practices.)

$response = Solar::factory('Solar_Http_Response');
$response->setResponseCode('200') // auto-sets response text to "Ok"
         ->setHeader('X-Example', 'Custom header value')
         ->setCookie('foo', 'bar') // sets cookie foo=bar
         ->setContent('<p>Hello world!</p>');

$response->display(); // sends sanitized headers and prints the content

Solar_Controller_Page, for example, composes a Solar_Http_Response internally, which it then returns for sending.