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Web tier: servlets, JSP, Web frameworks: Integrating PHPBB into existing J2EE system

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  1. Integrating PHPBB into existing J2EE system (5 messages)

    • Posted by: arjan tijms
    • Posted on: April 28 2005 07:11 EDT
    For all that concern, I've just started to work on a simple servlet and API that allows the popular PHPBB forum to be integrated into a J2EE system.

    Although its nothing fancy yet, this already may be of use to some people. It works by relaying requests to the J2EE app server to a seperate (private) PHPBB server, taking care of authentication by a (name configurable) session object that provides the right credentials for the currently logged in user.

    Received content from PHPBB is stripped from its headers (html, head, body tags etc) and put into the response between a configurable J2EE top and bottom.

    I wonder what people here think about this aproach? Is there demand for a project like this? Is this the right path to take for integration?

    Please let me know what you think.

    The initial release of this idea can be found at:
    http://phpbb2servlet.sourceforge.net/
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    Threaded Messages (5)

  2. Integrating PHPBB into existing J2EE system[ Go to top ]

    Hello,

    Hmm.. for new projects I think people will be tempted to use a pure Java approach maybe with JavaBB: http://javabb.dev.java.net/

    And maybe in a soon future, it will be easier to integrate PHPBB with J2EE directly in Java using the JSR-223 implementation?

    What do you think?

    Tug
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  3. Integrating PHPBB into existing J2EE system[ Go to top ]

    Hello,Hmm.. for new projects I think people will be tempted to use a pure Java approach maybe with JavaBB

    I wonder. For starters most J2EE forums I saw aren't that populair as PHPBB2. Secondly, the available java forums all seem to only work as a seperate web application. Unless I'm mistaken two different web applications can't communicate with eachother through either state or session. So, even though you have a J2EE app and a J2EE forum, they can only communicate with eachother through HTTP. In other words, you might just as well go for a PHP solution, or Perl or whatever,
    And maybe in a soon future, it will be easier to integrate PHPBB with J2EE directly in Java using the JSR-223 implementation?What do you think?Tug

    I surely would be nice if that worked, but I'm not really sure about to which degree PHP functionality is directly accesible by java code. Are PHP classes directly consumable (as with the different .Net languages)? You probably still need a small java abstraction layer to shield you from the JSR-223 details.

    If TS makes his code modulair enough, that its higher level API could easily be retargetted to communicate through either HTTP, the DB, or JSR-223. (although I still wonder if you can compile such a large beast as PHPBB directly to bytecode and have everything work as expected, we'll have to wait and see...)
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  4. PHPBB J2EE Integration Issue[ Go to top ]

    Hi All, I used http://sourceforge.net servlet for integrating PHPBB in to j2ee application. Currently I am facing some issues after integration. I will post the same below and let me know any body has faced same problem and has solution for the same. Issue 1 - In integrated application COmmunity Search - Apllication Header and footer gets disappeared. Issue 2 - Community search is not working. Issue 3 - Preview and Submit button is not working in integrated community site. While integrating I faced some problems like, reading the data from url stream as byte array did not work in Linux environment. I resolved that by using buffred input stream and reading line . Thanks & Regards Rama Mohana.S
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  5. Any new update[ Go to top ]

    Hi All, I am new to using phpbb forums in my site which is based on oracle portal and java portlets, so i need a way to make a sso between my site and phpbb, and i found this discussion. Is there a new update to it, or does phpbb3 provide more support to integration? or is this the best way till now? also how is the java forums rated now? are they famous as phpbb and vbulletin or not close? Please any help or guide is appreciated since i have a little time
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  6. Integrating PHPBB into existing J2EE system[ Go to top ]

    We just made a small update to this project. Sending cookies between the client, java server and phpbb server now works correctly.

    As far as the aproach is concerned, everything is purely done through HTTP, using standard PHPBB2 page names and their know request parameters. The advantage of this is that you can hook up any publically or privately accesible PHPBB2 server to our servlet.

    We indeed found it a problem that in fact there are Java forums available, but none are directly aimed at integration into an existing web app.

    As far as the API is concerned, we are looking into the various options. Using HTTP and standard pages for things as adding and updating users would be possible, but it may be hard to interpret any errors in this way. Alternatives may be the use of special prepared PHP pages that just call a single service and give a clean reply back, or writing into the PHPBB2 Database directly.

    Of course, with the latter two options, you won't be able to just use any PHPBB2 forum out there, but only your own one.
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