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Building the PHP ZeroMQ extension (php-zmq) for Windows

Because there is no pre-compiled PHP ZMQ extension after PHP version 7.2 it's necessary to build your own. This is a short review of the process. The PHP ZMQ extension is a wrapper around libzmq which also needs to be built. The steps needed to build libzmq are covered in another gist.

Extensions are PHP version specific as the PHP internals vary from release to release. While it's not necessary to build PHP to build an extension an extension build requires some files from the build of a version of PHP. Because its not difficult to build PHP, why not? By building a version of PHP you can build the extension at the same time.

The steps needed to build PHP are listed in the PHP SDK GitHub repository. For the purposes of this page, after following the steps the working folder will be something like:

.\php-sdk\sdk\php-8.2\vs16\x6

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The Zero MQ extension for PHP is not available as a Windows PECL package for PHP versions later than 7.2. So for later PHP versions it's necessary to build the extension. That also means building libzmq. The Zero MQ team have dropped the Visual Studio solutions files in favour using CMake. So how do users on Windows build Zero MQ? Here's how (and it's not hard).

Install Visual Studio. While installing, opt to install C++ and make sure the option to install the CMake tools for C++ is selected.

If VS is already installed because you use it for another project type, then use the Visual Studio Installer tool (available from the start menu) to modify the installation to add C++ and the CMake tools. Note tha in Visual Studio Installer the CMake tools will appears an option in the 'individual packages' (you'll know what I mean when you get there).

Download the ZeroMQ zip from GitHub and extract it. In whatever folder you chose to extract the zip file there will be a file called CMakeFiles.txt. Edit this f

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Subtle is the modern way to perform cryptographic task in JavaScript. However, examples provided in the Mozilla documentation or in their GitHub pages only show how to use the subtle functions to sign text and verify signatures using a key pair generated by subtle.

In my use case the key pair MUST be generated a recognised authority so how can the CryptoKey required by the subtle Sign and Verify functions be created from an external source. On this the documentation and examples are not very helpful so this gist provides a worked example showing how to do it.

Use case

In my case a signature is to be added to a document in the manner specified by XAdES which is defined by ETSI on behalf of the EU commission. The public key of the key pair used MUST be pa

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Protocols such as https://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/ or https://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core2/ define how to sign an XML document using a PKI certificate (gist XML Digital Signature describes how such a certificate can be generated using OpenSSL).

An XML document cannot be signed by manually adding information even with a certificate. Instead an application is needed to apply the certificate and sign the document using the private key associated with a certificate. However, when a suitable application is used then the XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
	<someElement>Ipso facto...</someElement>
</root> 

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When wanting to sign XML documents using a protocol such as https://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/ or https://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core2/ its necessary to have a certificate and its corresponding private key. Sure, you can buy a certificate and key from a certificate authority (CA) but if the purpose of the certificate is only to generate certificates for internal consumption, for testing or when verifiers will trust a CA you provide, then creating your own certificates and keys is free.

Here's how to do it using a tool like OpenSSL. Another tool could be used as this example uses only standard public key infrastructure (PKI) techniques. Throughtout I'm using a domain in the file names. This hints that the certificate will be available online so others will be able to access it to verify any certificates it is used to sign.

Create certificate authority

A certificate authority is just the owner of a certificate and public key where the [subject](https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

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With the Intl object JavaScript is awash with functions to format dates so why is another one needed? The functions in Intl are generic and address uses cases where it's important that dates are formatted in a way that is commonly recognized by users within a locale. But there are many cases where date formatting is needed that has nothing to do with locales. My specific case is to be able to output date information that is consistent with the XML date types:

QName	Format
xs:time	HH-MM-SS
xs:gYearMonth	YYYY-MM
xs:gYear	YYYY
xs:gMonthDay	--MM-DD
xs:gDay	---DD
xs:gMonth	--MM

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