[jibberia]

Hello Everybody...

In my quest to get semacode barcode scanning working *quickly* from python, I have implemented it as a web service with a quick PHP script. The semacode documentation suggests this, but they must have never tried it - their code doesn't work!

The problem is within java - many AWT image processing functions depend on a window server to do their work. In 1.4, though, a workaround was provided - environment variable java.awt.headless.

So, here's some PHP code:

$handle = fopen($filename, 'wb');
fputs($handle, $picfile, strlen($picfile));
fclose($handle);

$execstring = "java -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar semacode.jar -f $filename";

exec($execstring, $output, $error);
if($error > 0) {
echo "error $error. tried $execstring";
} else {
echo $output[0];
# we should delete the file here
}

I hope this helps somebody - I've spent a considerable amount of time on it!

-Kevin