Moving From Ruby To PHP

23 Aug 2023 - Eric Chrobak

At my 9-5 we provide a variety of telecom services to our clients and use Zoho One as our ERP. We have a texting platform that sends out mass text messages on behalf of our clients. However, they need the phone numbers verified before sending the sms blast out. We provide a service that scrubs the list of invalid phone numbers. When that is completed it sends an email to our CRM to generate an invoice. The crm parses the email to generate the invoice. We needed to move away from the email parser due to it’s instability.

It’s 2023! Why in the world am I programming in PHP?

It turns out a lot of companies have applications besides their WordPress website built with PHP. The application in questions is a PHP application. We decided to add a class to the existing PHP scrubbing application. This would authenticate with Zoho CRM and send the scrubbing data over via a POST request. I previously developed a Ruby application on AWS Lambda for a different use case. This Ruby application authenticated with Zoho CRM and made a POST request. We decided to change the syntax of the code to work in PHP.

How I built it in PHP

I wasn’t as familiar with OOP in PHP so I spent some time learning on PHP-Manual. The main differences were syntax and the necessary libraries. In the Ruby application I had Ruby gems for the following functionality:

• HTTP requests - Faraday
• Logging - Logger
  
  

The PHP standard for HTTP request is cUrl, which is what I am using. I created a function just for the cUrl call which would be used for authentication and the POST.

I also adjusted the syntax and variable declarations to ensure the code worked. After adding test data, the application authenticated and made a succesful POST call to Zoho CRM. I removed the class features to have the code be part of a copy and paste into the application.

What’s Next

I realized after removing the class functionality that the code is no longer modular or extensible to the existing application. So I will need to adjust the code to be a class once again. Then I will instantiate the class in the existing application. When the class is instantiated it will authenticate with Zoho. Then we can make a call.

Example code:

// Main application
$crm_payload = [
    "key1"=>"value1",
    "key2"=>"value2"
];
$zoho_api = new zohoCRM()
$zoho_api->crm_post("module_name","Upsert",$crm_payload)
class ZohoCRM
{
    var $headers;
    var $crm_base_api_url = "https://www.zohoapis.com/crm/v3/";

    function initialize()
    {
        $this=>authenticate()
    }

    function authenticate()
    {
        $headers["client_secret"] = "client_secret";
        $auth_url = "somezoho url";
        $response = $this=>crm_post($auth_url);
        $headers["Authorization"] = "Oauth " . $response["token"];
    }

    function crm_post($url, $post_type, $payload = null)
    {
        // crm post code here
        $curl_url = "";
        $this=>curl($curl_url);
    }

    function curl($url)
    {
        // curl code here
    }
}

Our Next Topic

After I finish adding the class to the PHP code, I will add logging and any necessary try/catch for error handling and debugging. Then we will review the finalized PHP Class.