I am trying to create an app which allows anybody to post code on their website which queries my databases and returns results.
I do not want the code to contain actual mysql statements or connection info (for the obvious security reasons).
Currently, I have a php code set up (for the foreign sites) which uses fsockopen to query my server and fgets to read the results (the mysql query and its connection information remain secured on my site).
Is there a better/ faster/ more secure way of doing this? What is the standard method? (I noticed that google's recaptcha uses this fsockopen/ fgets method as well) The reason I am asking this is becasue the fsockopen system is behaving quirky- sometimes my server decides to make the query and sometimes it doesn't (from my server's error logs). The same query works fine when requested from my own server (and not remotely via fsockopen), so the problem seems to be with the fsockopen method.
There are plenty of different methods to do this. The simplest and most common (in my experience) is to make a REST api.