Best way to allow others to read a file on my server?

[Magic2K2]

Hey guys,

I'm writing a script that others will use on their websites and it will need to fetch some data from my server. Right now, I'm using file_get_contents() as my function for retrieving the information and it appears that will work on PHP 4.3 and above. I like this function because it's simple, but I'm not too familiar with how many servers are likely to support it.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Daimaju]

so they are using the script on their servers but still get the data from your server?
then file_get_contents() has an url as paramter?

in php.ini is a setting called sth. like allow_url_fopen. if this is enabled it should work, but on the other hand this makes the script vulnerable to cross-site hacking (unless the url is kind of a constant)

you could take a look at soap

hope i understood you correctly, else my reply won't make much sense

[Magic2K2]

so they are using the script on their servers but still get the data from your server?
then file_get_contents() has an url as paramter?

in php.ini is a setting called sth. like allow_url_fopen. if this is enabled it should work, but on the other hand this makes the script vulnerable to cross-site hacking (unless the url is kind of a constant)

you could take a look at soap

hope i understood you correctly, else my reply won't make much sense

Yes, the actual line of code is something like:

$text = file_get_contents("http://www.mysite.com/myscript.php"); 

That line of code is on their web servers. myscript.php is the file on my server that dynamically serves up a line of text based on a couple factors.

I'm interested in what you are saying about cross-site hacking. Would my script be vulnerable to this type of thing?

I've heard about SOAP, but never really understood what it was for. I'll take a closer look now to see if I could use it.