Lab 4 - Submit Server

Once again, I got my best advice at the end of the lab. I'll share it with you-- use a library when trying to interact with the SQS.

The first approach I tried that failed was using cURL to send the PUT request. You can see the code I used for that in my previous POST. Although it works in general, I wasn't having much success using it with SQS. Perusing the SQS documentation a little more closely revealed that I was not sending the correct headers. Here's a link to it.

I didn't find that link until I had given up on cURL and switched to PEAR's HTTP_Request package. As far as general purpose HTTP request packages go, the interface is much easier to use. I added most of the headers, but was having trouble formatted the Authorization header correctly. That's when I got the advice to use a library.

I checked out a couple SQS libraries for PHP, the one I ended up going with was one I found on Amazon's site. The documentation is wanting, but I was able to figure out what to do. It makes use of the PEAR extensions. I didn't have to make the changes to the PEAR code like it suggests on the site (I don't know if it's because it was correct, or because I wasn't exercising the faulty code).

Here's the code I used to make the request:

function submitToQueue($xml) {
  $q = new sqs('ACCESS-KEY', 'SECRET-KEY', 'http://queue.amazonaws.com/');
  $queueId="A3N3IV5XJH079S/processing";
  $q->putMessage($xml, $queueId, 1000);
}


And that was it.