Endianness in PHP

Two questions: 1) Is there a standardized way or recommended best practice for conversions of ints, longs, and doubles to network byte order? 2) Can anyone recommend a cheap way to gain access to a Big-Endian machine for development and testing? The reason I ask is that I see that AMFEXT makes no effort to convert byte order when serializing an integer: http://lxr.php.net/xref/PECL/amfext/amf.c#amf3_write_int The AMF3 spec indicates that numbers are to be serialized in network byte order (i.e., "big-endian"). I see that Z_LVAL macros are used to extract the actual number data from a zval object or pointer to zval object by grabbing the contents of the zval's "lval" field which is declared as long. That function I linked, amf3_write_int, appears to work fine on a linux box with intel chip. I'm thinking it would break on a big-endian chip. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!