PHP Generic Web Services and SOAP

Have you ever wanted to enrich your site with information from Google, Amazon, eBay, or one of the many other sites that provide web services through SOAP? In this tutorial, I will be demonstrating how to use the SOAP package from PEAR to query Google s extensive database (consuming the web service, in the jargon). This tutorial assumes you are using PHP 4 and PEAR::SOAP 0.8.1, and requires basic familiarity with PHP (including a little object-o...

At the end of my last article, we had SOAP running with PHP and were using Google as a glorified spell-checker. Seeing as it is rather well known as a search engine, this week we ll look into conducting web searches in a bit more detail. We ll also talk about how to deal with any errors that occur. Searching with Google Instead of the simple string returned by doSpellingSuggestion, when calling doGoogleSearch we get a nested structure of objects...

Web services allow you to exchange information over HTTP using XML. When you want to find out the weather forecast for New York City, the current stock price of IBM, or the best-selling DVD according to Amazon.com, you can write a short script to gather that data in a format you can easily manipulate. From a developer s perspective, it s as if you re calling a local function that returns a value. // ); //]] A major advantage of web services is u...

Since its release in 2004, PHP 5 has evolved to become stable enough for serious consideration in use in a production environment. Along the way, PHP 5 has seen more than a handful of tweaks and changes, especially in its overhauled support for XML and XML web services. Now that it is a stable, it is fitting that there be a reference on all things PHP and XML. Enter Pro PHP XML and Web Services, which aims to be your single source of refer...

In the previous installment of this four-part series regarding creating spatially enabled Web applications, you learned how to create a local datasource mapping mailing addresses to latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates using the Geo::Coder::US Perl package and the U.S Census Bureau s TIGER/Line data. In this final installment, you ll learn how to make this data available to the world through a Perl-based Web service. To demonstrate the servic...

SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol has built his concept on XML-RPC, but provides much richer features sets. In this article we are going to build a simple SOAP server and client which will use our new service. You should know what SOAP is (SOAP packet structure), but purpose of this article is to show programmers how easy is to build web services (SOAP). Even if you don t know XML, SOAP, WSDL, the only requirement is basic XML kn...

In an earlier article, I outlined the basics of Web services and how you can use PHP and SOAP to talk to Amazon.com. But SOAP isn t the only way a developer can query Amazon s database. The other method is known as REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer. // ); //]] REST, unlike SOAP, doesn t require you to install a separate tool kit to send and receive data. Instead, the idea is that everything you need to use Web services is al...

Over the last ten years, eBay has emerged as a platform where people can buy and sell practically anything. With more than 135 million users worldwide, eBay is a thriving online marketplace. Best of all, eBay isn t constrained by HTML. By using eBay s web services APIs, members of the eBay Developers Program can hook into the eBay platform using XML to integrate eBay into their own applications. // ); //]] Like many web services, the eBay API co...

Everyone, but everyone, knows what Amazon.com is - it s the largest (and, for my money, coolest) online store on the planet, selling everything from baby clothes to the new Volkswagen Beetle. It s been around since the beginning of the Web and offers one of the friendliest shopping experiences online, together with great customer service and a wide variety of discounts.

In this concluding article, find out how to add search features to your AWS-backed online store, and link your product pages up to Amazon.com s shopping carts and wish lists. In the first part of this article, I introduced you to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the XML-based API that allows regular Joes to supercharge their online stores with Amazon s product catalog and databases. I showed you the basics of AWS, demonstrating the API calls needed to ...

In the previous article in this series I demonstrated how XML is used to make remote procedure calls with XML-RPC in PHP. This article will focus on SOAP and WSDL (both of which use XML as their underlaying method of describing data) and demonstrate how a PHP script can act as a SOAP client and auto-magically discover detailed information about a web service. An overview of Soap SOAP, originally an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol, is a ...