[thelist] Payment processing

[Paul Bennett]

Hi all,

I've got one of those projects which has you bashing your head against walls. There is an existing site which is using shared hosting - It's running PHP on IIS and I need to gather some basic data and post it as xml to a payment provider in order to start a payment processing sequence. This would normally be pretty straightforward but:

* PHP hasn't been compiled with openssl support so fsockopen to https:// won't work
* curl is not installed on the shared server, so that fallback won't work

I've looked at using JS solutions as a way to get communication to the payment server but:
* js solutions have cross-domain scripting security issues as I'm trying to post to another domain
* the provider uses XML not JSON and also require POST, so hacks like this (http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1636) won't work

Coupled with this, I have an antsy client and a project manager who's on leave for the next week or so (can you say "project from hell"?)

Apart from switching servers or asking for PHP upgrades (not likely to happen) does anyone have ideas on how to get a POST session working between servers with the above constraints? I'm rapidly running out of ideas.

*ANY* help or advice appreciated

:)
Paul