Calling a PHP page from within Java

Question

We have an application that uses a lot of PHP (both web and cmd line based PHP calls) to manage the solution. One of the PHP pages in particular has two parameters that it takes to identify a city and a site within that city. The URL looks like this:
http://host/directory/page.php?city=somecity&sitecode=1234&log=Y
This page then logs in to the DB for that city and finds certain records for that site code and deletes them and creates a log file.There is a scheduled job that sends an email every night to a group (of which I am a member) with a listing of sites that contain these records that need to be deleted. Then someone (now me) opens a web browser and modifies the URL using the email and processes each one, one at a time.
So, short term I have written an html form with a little javascript to give me a couple of fields, one for city and one for site.
I then read those fields and call a js window.open() and open another page with the correct data. This way I can sit there and type them all in one after another then go back through each page and see the results later. This is a llot quicker as some of the pages can run for minutes finding and deleting the records. This page is provided by a third party so we can't modify it.
Long term I would like to have a java app that finds all of these records and eliminates the records one at a time. So the class might look like this:
Public class DeleteRecords() {
String phpResult = null;
String phpPage = null;
Loop Through All DBS {
// Some SQL that finds the records in this DB
// The phpResult variable should be the php/html content that makes up the page after the process completes
phpResult = http://host/directory/page.php?city=somecity&sitecode=1234&log=Y
if(phpResult.contains("_Successful")){
               // log successful event for city, site, and path to log file
else {
          // log failed event for city, site, and path to log file }
} // End DB loop
} // End ClassIs this possible and are their samples somewhere on java.sun.com?
Thanks,
Shawn

Answer 1

ShawnTaylor wrote:
cotton.m wrote:
HttpURLConnection is what you are looking for for starters. Code samples and explanations can be found in the tutorial here [_http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/networking/urls/index.html_|http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/networking/urls/index.html]
There has to be an easier way though... like JDBC or something?If only that were true... The problem is the application is third-party, so we can't really 'touch' any of the tools being provided. My plan is to identify the orphaned records via JDBC but I need to use the tool provided for the clean up.
Well then the first part of my post is your answer.