How to use PHP Excel without php built in zip archive

"Fatal error: Class 'ZIPARCHIVE' not found"

I found myself in in the situation that I had to use PHPExcel to generate some graphs. Sounds easy enough, and it kind of is, but... after I develop locally on my machine running php 5.3 I face myself with the challenge that I have to install the code on a machine running php 5.1.2 (not suported by PHPExcel). I soon found out that the main problem is the fact that php 5.1 dose not have ZipArchive or PHPExcel_Shared_ZipArchive, you can install them but with a lot of headache and a lot of trying (more than 1 solutions available for more than 1 case) and to be honest, that solution was not the proper way to do it as this was a production server with a lot of stuff on it (you don't want to mess it up).
Maybe a guru server admin could find a proper solution, but I am not that, I am a dev, so... I started researching to find a way to change to another lib that works on 5.1. And so I found... nothing!!! (at least after 2-3h of research and reading a lot of useless forum posts).
As my search was not fruitful and time consuming and annoying I moved my atention to something I love but not like doing: hacking the code ( hacking the code of a maintained lib is not encouraged as this may lead to rough upgrades with lots of diffs etc.  ).
After a little more research and documentation I found pclzip as a php standalone lib here and I found that PHPExcel has a very simple way of changing the ziping class in the settings.
So this is what I have done:

1. imported the pclzip lib
2. created a wrapper class for compatibility reasons (pclzip dose not have the function names implemented in the other to libs)
3. added my wrapper class as a ziping method in settings.php
4. forced PHPExcel to use my class for ziping

NOTICE: This was tested only for writing, so I have no ideea what will happen when reading, but that is the subject of another post.

Here is a short description of the code I created:

################################################
// pclzip.extended.php
################################################

include('pclzip.lib.php');  // PhpConcept Library - Zip Module 2.8.2 -  http://www.phpconcept.net
class PCLZipExtended{
 // just a place holder
 function PCLZipExtended(){
  
 }
 
 private $zip;
 private $temp_dir;
 // implementation of function open
 // this function needs to create the zip file
 // pclzip dose not create the file untill any action is taken (create/append)
 function open($pFilename,$zipCreate){
  $this->zip = new PclZip($pFilename);
  $this->zip->create(array());
  
  return file_exists($pFilename);
 }
 // implementation of addFromString function
 // needs to save the string to a local file and then append it to the archive
 // keeping the paths is a ***ch
 function addFromString($_location,$data){
  $location=$this->tempdir().$_location;
  if(!file_exists(dirname($location)))
   mkdir(dirname($location), 0777, true);
  file_put_contents($location,$data);
  $loc_to_add = explode('/',$location);
  array_shift ($loc_to_add);
  array_pop ($loc_to_add);
  $loc_to_add = implode('/',$loc_to_add);
  $this->zip->add($location,$loc_to_add,dirname($location));
 }
 // we are done and we can clean up after our selfs 
 function close(){
  
  // do cleanup
  $this->rrmdir($this->tempdir());
 }
 // generate a temp dir to store the files needed for the zip
 // or if we already done this return it
 // and yes php 5.1 dose not have sys_get_temp_dir
 private function tempdir($dir='') {
  if(isset($temp_dir)) return $temp_dir;
  $tempfile=tempnam($dir,'');
  if (file_exists($tempfile)) { unlink($tempfile); }
  mkdir($tempfile);
  if (is_dir($tempfile)) { return $temp_dir=$tempfile.'/'; }
  return false;
 }
 // recursive delete for php
 private function rrmdir($dir='') {
  if (is_dir($dir)) {
   $objects = scandir($dir);
   foreach ($objects as $object) {
    if ($object != "." && $object != "..") {
     if (filetype($dir."/".$object) == "dir") rmdir($dir."/".$object); else unlink($dir."/".$object);
    }
   }
   reset($objects);
   rmdir($dir);
  }
 }
 
}

################################################
// PHPExcel: PHPExcel/PHPExcel/Settings.php
################################################

################

    const PCLZIP        = 'PHPExcel_Shared_ZipArchive';
// line: 42 added just this
    const PCLZIP_SOURCE = 'PCLZipExtended';
// line: 42 added just this
    const ZIPARCHIVE    = 'ZipArchive';

################


        if (($zipClass === self::PCLZIP) ||
// line: 120 added just this
            ($zipClass === self::PCLZIP_SOURCE) ||
// line: 120 added just this
            ($zipClass === self::ZIPARCHIVE)) {

################

################################################
// Main php file that dose all the work
################################################

        include('modules/ER_Reports/pclzip.extended.php');
        include('modules/ER_Reports/PHPExcel/PHPExcel.php');
        PHPExcel_Settings::setZipClass(PHPExcel_Settings::PCLZIP_SOURCE);
        $er = new ER_Reports();

And that's all folks!!!!