Re: [SOAP] New member, a few questions

Colin Witt wrote:

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.

Get the pear::soap module from the pear cvs tree. The webservice.zip is just a light wrapper around pear::soap to help provide for autocompletion in Komodo, and has a 'fairly old' version of pear::soap in it. You can find cvs instructions from cvs.php.net.

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?

Well, the primary reason this list was created is to discuss soap in php, but feel free to ask questions also. If traffic starts to get busy, well split into two lists.

(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?

CVS right now. I keep promising to get pear::soap into a distributable tar ball so the pear command will install it, but still haven't gotten to it.

(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."

pear::soap and php-soap are the libraries targeted to be php's standard soap implementation. php-soap is somewhat behind in interoperability and features right now, but that will change quickly. Once some more work is done, things will be integrated to be part of the standard php distribution.

(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.

CVS has a few examples, and for pear::soap, the interop tests are the best examples of servers right now. There are more examples in CVS. Regards, Shane