PHP GDAL/OGR library usage, which approach is cleaner?

Question

I will be using gdal/ogr for a new project. I want a lean but fully functional app, so will not be using other implementations such as mapserver, because they have extraneous co

Answer 1

You can use the Symfony Process-Component, avoiding plain exec commands.
It has a great syntax and is very easy to use.

http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/process.html

$process = new Process('ls -lsa');
$process->run();

// executes after the command finishes
if (!$process->isSuccessful()) {
    throw new ProcessFailedException($process);
}

echo $process->getOutput();

Answer 2

I wound up using the exec functions, mostly because there was no time to get into swig or php extension development, which were the preferred methods for me, personally. // here is a small sample snippet of it's usage, hopefully it will come in handy for someone else

public function convertToNewFormat($format)
        {
                return(
                    exec('ogr2ogr -f '
                        .$format
                        .' '.self::setNewFileLocation()
                        .' '.self::setOldFileLocation()));

        }