Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP

[sukishan]

Web services are widely supported by all the major technology vendors and organizations including IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and the W3C. Millions of dollars have been invested in the development of this technology. Web services allow you to share data across many platforms and hardware configurations. For example, you can create a Java web service and someone else can consume it using a .NET client without having to learn one line of Java code.

There are many available scripting languages that support web services. PHP is one such language, with a powerful arsenal of open source functions and tools.

In this article, we will compare and contrast three methods of consuming and producing web services: XML-RPC, SOAP and REST. This article assumes that the reader has a basic knowledge of both web service specifications and PHP. You must also have access to a PHP-enabled web server to implement our code samples.