LiveDocx has been developed to be independent of any programming language. All functionality of LiveDocx is made available via a SOAP interface.
Although it is quite possible to use LiveDocx directly in PHP with no further libraries (at least, as of PHP 5), phpLiveDocx encapsulates the entire functionality of LiveDocx, making is very easy to use. All you need to do, is download the phpLiveDocx library, unzip and copy it onto you server and you can start generating word processing documents in a matter of minutes.
How it works
Over at the official LiveDocx web site, the developers have published the following diagram:
The text in the green shape to the left represents a word processing template; the text in the dark blue shape to the left represents an XML file, which contains the data that is to be merged into the template. The cloud in the middle of the diagram is the LiveDocx service, which is addressed using the phpLiveDocx library. The resulting document – in this case a short letter – can be downloaded as a word processing file (DOCX, DOC, RTF or PDF).
Recap
LiveDocx is the name of the SOAP-based service that does all the work and phpLiveDocx is the name of the PHP library, which simplifies access in PHP to the SOAP service.