Introduction
COM is a technology which allows the reuse of code written in any
language (by any language) using a standard calling convention and hiding
behind APIs the implementation details such as what machine the Component is
stored on and the executable which houses it. It can be thought of as a super
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism with some basic object roots. It
separates implementation from interface.
COM encourages versioning, separation of implementation from
interface and hiding the implementation details such as executable location and
the language it was written in.
Requirements
COM functions are only available on the Windows version of PHP.
Installation
There is no installation needed to use these
functions; they are part of the PHP core.
The windows version of PHP
has built in support for this extension. You do not need to load any additional
extension in order to use these functions.
Runtime Configuration
The behaviour of these functions is affected by settings in php.ini.
Table 1. Com configuration options
| Name | Default | Changeable |
|---|
| com.allow_dcom | "0" | PHP_INI_SYSTEM |
| com.autoregister_typelib | "0" | PHP_INI_SYSTEM |
| com.autoregister_verbose | "0" | PHP_INI_SYSTEM |
| com.autoregister_casesensitive | "1" | PHP_INI_SYSTEM |
| com.typelib_file | "" | PHP_INI_SYSTEM |
For further details and definition of the PHP_INI_* constants see
ini_set().
Predefined Constants
The constants below are defined by this extension, and
will only be available when the extension has either
been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.