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!