Validate Form with PHP with Data Posting to Java Application

Question

I have a Java application (servlet, written by someone else) that does some processing. I have a PHP application (web site HTML that uses PHP in places) on top that posts data to the Java application:

<form method="post" action="http://site/java" onsubmit="return validate(this)">

I have the JavaScript validating, as well onsubmit .

This works fine, but when I try and validate with PHP (in case JS is disabled), I run into problems.

I'm not sure how to do this. I've tried a few things but none has been really what I want. I want to be able to mimic the JS behavior but with PHP.

It would be cool if I could do something like this:

if ('POST' == $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']) {
    //do post to servlet
}

I've tried other things like this:

if (isset($_POST['field'])) {
    //validate form with function
}

Part of the problem is that the Java application also does some validation and returns some parameters I can get. I might use something like this to check these:

if ($_GET['error'] == 'invalidEmail') {
    $error = 'Please enter a valid email address.';
}

How would I do this? Can I use Location response header or does this not send POST data? If I set action="" and post back to page, I can get the PHP to validate but obviously the whole point is to post to the Java application.

Answer 1

You can use REST to post to your java application from php. More specifically the cURL library.