PHP Web Services: Getting Started

From the article on PHP Web Services:

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is popular in the enterprise, as it simplifies connecting systems. One of the preferred technologies used to implement SOA is Web services, other contenders being traditional messaging systems and plain old XML (POX) techniques. Web services technologies are capable of enabling machine-to-machine interactions, ensuring interoperability among heterogeneous systems. This helps realize loose coupling, a key characteristic of SOA. The machine processable interface, defined using WSDL, message based interactions, using SOAP, and the use of other Web related standards such as HTTP and XML, are the key pillars on which Web services are built.

Given the importance of Web services in the SOA era, it is a must that any programming language has provision to leverage the power of this technology and be able to play its role in a SOA implementation. PHP too has several options when it comes to working with Web services, however, one of the problems till recently was that the level of support for Web services in PHP was limited to SOAP interactions with some level of WSDL coverage. There was hardly any support for the full Web services stack, including addressing, binary attachments and security.