Call to new HttpRequest fails - php

Question

I am trying to get a PHP script working. The purpose of the script is to call out to a web service. I've reduced the script down to it's simpliest components and it is still failing. Here it is:
<?php
print "Hello";
$request = new HttpRequest('http://www.pivotaltracker.com/services/v3/source_commits', HttpRequest::METH_POST);
print "Done";
?>
The output is:
D:\svn\svndb\hooks>"c:\Program Files\PHP\php.exe" -f test.php
Hello
D:\svn\svndb\hooks>
As you can see, the script fails when trying to instantiate an instance of HttpRequest. However, no exception is thrown.
I am not a PHP program... I'm just trying to get this feature working. I suspect I have no loaded an extension library that I need... but I can't figure out which one that would be, if indeed that is the problem.
I am running on Windows 2003. I am running PHP 5.3.3.
I did run phpinfo() but am hesitant to post the results here since it is so large. Is there a section of the phpinfo() output that would be helpful to provide?

Answer 1

Put a error_reporting(E_ALL); in front and see what happens.
My bet is that the HTTPRequest class doesn't exist. The HTTP extension is a PECL package that needs to be installed separately.

Answer 2

Thank you everyone for your answers. They were all spot on. I thought I'd summnarize what I did in the end in case it helps someone else.
The problem was indeed that I had not installed the http PECL extension. Unfortunately, I am on windows and there was no distriubtion of this extension and I didn't want to install the microsoft tools on this box to be able to compile the source. So, I went with the suggestion listed above and implemented it using curl.
The script I was working on was to integration svn to http://www.pivotaltracker.com using the excellent php script found at http://phpjack.com/content/pivotal-tracker-and-subversion. I modified that script as follows (in case someone else is in a similar spot):
$request = new HttpRequest('http://www.pivotaltracker.com/services/v3/source_commits', HttpRequest::METH_POST);
$headers = array(
'X-TrackerToken' => $token,
'Content-type' => 'application/xml'
);
$request->setHeaders($headers);
$request->setBody("<source_commit><message>$message</message><author>$author</author><commit_id>$rev</commit_id></source_commit>");
$request->send();
became
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Content-Type: application/xml","X-TrackerToken: $token"));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $body);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
print $result;
Thanks again for all the excellent and timely advise.

Answer 3

Error reporting by error_reporting( E_ALL );
Enable display errors ini_set('display_errors', 1);
Better to change these settings from php.ini.
If it's not working look at apache logs (error.log)

Answer 4

You could use cURL for that simple purpose:
<?php
$url = "http://www.pivotaltracker.com/services/v3/source_commits";
$ch = curl_init();
// set the target url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
// howmany parameter to post
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
// parameters
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "someParameter=someValue");
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
print $result;
?>
Or use fsockopen() to connect to a server and fwrite to send a raw http post request.