How can I fetch data from more than one web services concurrently using PHP?

Question

I have 3 web services that are providing me data for my hotel booking engine. It is taking too long if I run them sequentially. Therefore I wanted to run them using threads. But not sure if php threading will support this and if its safe (since all 3 processes that will handle the web service will read and write into shared tables )

Can Anyone advise me on how I should proceed ??

http://php.net/manual/en/class.thread.php – verisimilitude Jul 17 '14 at 06:21 — verisimilitude, Jul 17 '14 at 06:21
http://stackoverflow.com/a/7681663/1868660 – Subodh Ghulaxe Jul 17 '14 at 06:31 — Subodh Ghulaxe, Jul 17 '14 at 06:31

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

I generally use following function to send Simultaneuos HTTP requests to web services

<?php

function multiRequest($data, $options = array()) {

  // array of curl handles
  $curly = array();
  // data to be returned
  $result = array();

  // multi handle
  $mh = curl_multi_init();

  // loop through $data and create curl handles
  // then add them to the multi-handle
  foreach ($data as $id => $d) {

    $curly[$id] = curl_init();

    $url = (is_array($d) && !empty($d['url'])) ? $d['url'] : $d;
    curl_setopt($curly[$id], CURLOPT_URL,            $url);
    curl_setopt($curly[$id], CURLOPT_HEADER,         0);
    curl_setopt($curly[$id], CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

    // post?
    if (is_array($d)) {
      if (!empty($d['post'])) {
        curl_setopt($curly[$id], CURLOPT_POST,       1);
        curl_setopt($curly[$id], CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $d['post']);
      }
    }

    // extra options?
    if (!empty($options)) {
      curl_setopt_array($curly[$id], $options);
    }

    curl_multi_add_handle($mh, $curly[$id]);
  }

  // execute the handles
  $running = null;
  do {
    curl_multi_exec($mh, $running);
  } while($running > 0);


  // get content and remove handles
  foreach($curly as $id => $c) {
    $result[$id] = curl_multi_getcontent($c);
    curl_multi_remove_handle($mh, $c);
  }

  // all done
  curl_multi_close($mh);

  return $result;
}

?>

to consume web services I use

<?php

$data = array(
  'http://search.yahooapis.com/VideoSearchService/V1/videoSearch?appid=YahooDemo&query=Pearl+Jam&output=json',
  'http://search.yahooapis.com/ImageSearchService/V1/imageSearch?appid=YahooDemo&query=Pearl+Jam&output=json',
  'http://search.yahooapis.com/AudioSearchService/V1/artistSearch?appid=YahooDemo&artist=Pearl+Jam&output=json'
);
$r = multiRequest($data);

echo '<pre>';
print_r($r);

?>

Hope this helps you :)

Also check this answer here

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

If it is good with AJAX use AJAX to call your web service.. Since ajax is an async task you can call the service asynchronously and write the further process or code on the success function.

You can use ajax like this:

$.ajax({ 
     type: "GET", // insert type
     dataType: "jsonp",
     url: "http://address/to/your/web/service",
     success: function(data){        
     alert(data);
    }
});

Please refer Here for more info.

How can I fetch data from more than one web services concurrently using PHP?

2 Answers2