New member, a few questions

Hi ... I'm new to the list, and have a few basic questions that may or may not be appropriate for discussion here. If I'm out of line, please accept my apologies. I've got a good amount of PHP experience and have read a bit about SOAP and Web Services, and I'm glad there's an effort to bring the kind of Web Services support to PHP that Microsoft has in .NET. As my first intro to Web Services, I'm trying to take a university news site, located at http://pr.baylor.edu/, and make the news available as a Web Service. We'll eventually want to allow departments to display headlines for stories that are tagged for that department in the main news system, and we'll need to deploy this to a variety of servers and platforms ... sounds like a good thing to use Web Services for. I've looked at XML-RPC and NuSOAP, and am now looking at PEAR SOAP, which seems like an effort to coordinate all of this. I downloaded webservices.zip from the ActiveState PHP Web Services Quick Start page (which it appears Shane Caraveo maintains), and it appears to date to around March 22. Nevertheless, I got our server admin to install it, and I can get a Client to do quite a few things. Now, the Server is another matter, as it seems to be lacking in any kind of documentation or support that I can find. So the questions are: (0) First, is this list only for developers who are bringing SOAP to PHP, or is it also for those of us wanting to use SOAP in PHP? (1) How do I go about getting a more recent version of the things being discussed on this list? Not actually running a server, I'm not familiar with CVS ... is that something I need to learn? (2) When will SOAP be available as a more standard part of PHP? Still sounds like a hack to the boss to use SOAP in PHP, and I really don't want to go all .NET. Sure would be nice to say "well, we've got PHP so SOAP is already there." (3) Documentation, or at least examples, would be wonderful. I read mention of the interop server source being available, which might help me a great deal, but this is nowhere to be found. The interop folder in my distribution is empty, and the only thing in examples is the stockquote script. (4) Has anyone implemented a PHP-based Web Service for handling news? If so, can I see what you've done to better understand how I might apply this in our case? Thanks for your help and your work on this, which I think is very important to the future of PHP. Colin Witt Baylor University Colin_Witt@baylor.edu