I'm tasked with integrating RETS I to a php based website. I've heard that phrets is a good library to use. The site is on a shared hosting platform (godaddy). I thought I could build a page with some search fields and have it do a query and display the results on a second page? Other places I've read name it sound more like I will still need to run a local server that copies the data and stores it locally. Now I'm not sure what to do. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.
A:
Don't try to work with RETS using PHP, even if you're a master PHP developer, you will fail miserably because PHP is so not the tool for RETS processing.
That said. The defacto tool for RETS is libRETS and it has compatible swig bindings to Ruby, Python, and I believe C# as well as a native C++ implementation.
Lastly, its technically possible to have a web request fire off a RETS query, get the results back, and then transform the data for presentation, but its very possible for a relatively simple query to take upwards of 15-30 seconds due to load on the remote RETS server. So its usually better to build or find software to replicate all or some of an MLS's active listings.
David
2010-03-04 06:42:47