Der bei weitem “lustigste” Prozess ist der der switch.ch, der Schweizer Registry. Dort sind nicht nur finanzielle und organisatorische Hürden zu nehmen (und auch die sind nicht zu knapp) sondern auch ein technischer Parcours.

Dieser Parcours (der heißt wirklich so) besteht aus 23 epp transactionen (Querbeet, dh personen, hostobjekte, domains anlegen, löschen und so weiter) die einem Durchgang durchzuführen sind.

Das bedeutet, daß jeder Registrar neben des Implementierungsaufwands für den normalen Clienten, sich nochmals zwei Tage (solange habe ich alles in allem gebraucht) Zeit & Geld nehmen darf um den Parcours zu implementieren. Man muß allerdings auch wirklich zugeben, wenn man den Parcour implementiert (und somit verstanden) hat, daß man auch die Prozesse der switch “durchschaut” hat.

The giturl you’ll find the code at is

http://github.com/MarkHofstetter/php-epp-client

remarks/comments/suggestion are very welcome

download the complete example here

First things first. Don’t, *again* don’t, use Zend 1.9 which seems to have some bugs, use at least 1.91.
What I’ve done I changed as few things as possible to get the guestbook quickstart demo running on Oracle.
Only some minor yak shaving had to take place:

• You cannot easily user the Zend .ini style configuration  because you need some Db_Zend constansts, so you either have to use XML style config or hardcode the constants (and the credentials) directly in the Bootstrap.php file (the easy route which I have taken)
• In Oracle its not possible to name a column “COMMENT” so I have chosen “COMMENTS” instead which is equally bad but at least working
• Use at least Zend 1.91, have I already mentioned that?
• I haven’t came around to get “Zend_Db::CASE_FOLDING => Zend_Db::CASE_UPPER” working quickly, so all the column names used have to be upper case as they are stored in the Oracle data dictonary views

Installation

• Be careful, if you break something it’s your fault not mine
• Everything is you need is in the zip file which should be unpacked in a directory accessable by your webserver, in the many cases (also with the XAMPP and LAMPP packages) this folder is named “htdocs”

Database (Oracle) Side

• if you have user create privileges (usually SYSTEM or SYS user), you may execute the questbook.sql script found in the INSTALL folder
• if you don’t have user create privileges, but a database user (the name doesn’t matter) login as the user and start with line 6 (the create sequence command) of the guestbook.sql file

PHP Side

• in application/Bootstrap.php change the dbname, username and password to your settings

You are ready

• navigate your web browser to http://<yourhostname>/quickstart/public/guestbook and everything should work out fine

hopefully I did not forget any features/request types. The most interessting new feature is the web client, which is in my oppion easy to use and really usefull for small scale registrars

so the new feature for this release are

• web client
• all request types (hopefully)

what is still lacking is reasonable error handling, support of severel registrars and possibly multi client capabiltiy, when installing please be carefull that your php.ini(s) include openssl/ssl support

for more information please go to  the php-epp-client main page

new feature(s);

• a command line client

shell> php client.php epp-config.xml domain-info
domain : bla.at
trid : 123

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?><epp xmlns="urn:i
e" xsi:schemaLocation="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:epp-1.0 epp-1.0.xsd">
<response>
<result code="1000">
<msg>Command completed successfully</msg>
</result><msgQ count="1" id="296463033"/>
<resData>
<domain:infData xmlns:domain="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:domain-1.0" x
<domain:name>bla.at</domain:name>
<domain:roid>bla.at</domain:roid>
<domain:status s="ok"/>
<domain:registrant>FS1533880</domain:registrant>
<domain:contact type="admin">FS1533880</domain:contact>
<domain:contact type="tech">NIS1494123</domain:contact>
<domain:ns>
<domain:hostAttr>
<domain:hostName>ns1.nessus.at</domain:hostName>
</domain:hostAttr>
<domain:hostAttr>
<domain:hostName>ns2.nessus.at</domain:hostName>
</domain:hostAttr>
<domain:hostAttr>
<domain:hostName>ns3.nessus.at</domain:hostName>
</domain:hostAttr>
</domain:ns>
<domain:clID>Reg326</domain:clID>
<domain:upDate>2006-05-23T08:52:53.00Z</domain:upDate>
</domain:infData>
</resData>
<trID>
<clTRID>123</clTRID>
<svTRID>2009012811122133516239-992-nicat</svTRID>
</trID>
</response>

</epp>

1000
Command completed successfully

shell>

This is so 90s!

So I thought of doing it with a little php and Ajax using the finger tool (or something similar) provided by most registries. Taking this opportunity I also tried it in three different ways to check which Ajax Framework to use.

See how it works

The oldfashioned way - by hand

See the code here, a little clumsy

The Sajax Framework

See the code here, the Framework is quite new, and honestly I didn’t get the code to work on this server, it worked nicely with a XAMPP installation on windows, but neither on OpenSuse 10 nor on AIX 5.3. The callbacks are also an nuisance i.e. that you have to code them yourself.

The xajax Framework

See the code here. This is the shortest and most elegant code by far. Coming from the examples it took me about three minutes to adapt the example. For me the clear winner of this short comparison

for more information please go to  the php-epp-client main page

Es sind noch nicht die Templates für alle Kommandos fertig, aber anhand der Beispiele sollte es klar sein was zu tun ist. Zur Zeit auch einmal ohne Doku, ich hoffe ich komme da einmal dazu - bei Fragen bitte einfach mailen.

In Zukunft werde ich die Doku/Änderungen auf der Hauptseite der Client Packages präsentieren, die jeweils neueste Version der Software wird es hier geben.