Forward data from php script to calendar - php

Question

I have a project where I need to do the following: retrieve some data from a form, fill the database, create a response for the user and post the data to a third party. To give an example, it's like booking a ticket to a concert.The ajax call: You buy the ticket, you receive a response (whether the purchase was successful), a php script sends data to the database, and someone may be announced that a new ticket was bought. Now, I need to pass data to that "someone". Which is what I don't know how to do.
Or, like when someone posts a comment to my question on stackoverflow, I get a notification.
In my particular case, the user creates an event, receives a response and I will need to have certain parameters posted by the user on a calendar. It is important that I could hardly integrate the calendar with the script retrieving the data. I would rather need to "forward" the data to the calendar- quite like pushing notifications.
Can anyone please give me a clue what should I use, or what should I need in order to do the above?
The process will go like this:
AJAX
user----> php script->database
|_ calendar

Answer 1

So if i get you right, you could post your data to the calendar via curl:
$url = "http://www.your-url-to-the-calendar.com";
$postData = array(
"prop1" => "value1",
"prop2" => "value2",
"prop3" => "value3"
);
//urlify the data for the post
$data_string = "";
foreach ($postData as $key => $value)
$data_string .= urlencode($key) . '=' . urlencode($value) . '&';
$data_string = rtrim($data_string, '&');
//will output --> prop1=value1&prop2=value2=prop3=value3
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => false,
CURLOPT_POST => count($postData),
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $data_string
));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
If your third party calendar does not require authentication than this would be the best way to post it, if you can not write to the database yourself.
When it requires authentication you would have to first login via curl (send credentials via curl-post, receive cookies, send cookies with your data)
Hope this helps.