What was Microsoft Doing @ OSCON?

Well, they partnered with WSO2, to bridge Microsoft products and open source technologies.

The booth attracted very interesting people. There were very interesting questions. Some asked on why WSO2 should be partnering with the software giant. Some were keen on the technologies that we were offering. Some were just curios on the intentions of Microsoft. And some even thought that we were marketing a stock trader application that runs on Windows platform. Some even asked, SOA - what is that?

Some were very skeptical, and Sanjiva has answered them already.

The best part was the story we had and there were quite a number of people who were looking for just such a story. The seamless interoperability between .Net, Java and the scripting space, demonstrated by the stock trader application was a dream come true. We had PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl on one end, Java on another and .NET on another. The three layers of the sample app, one client layer and two service layers, could be mixed and matched, irrespective of the implementation. And the business models of the two organizations involved in this effort was drastically different, yet the application did not care and worked perfectly. Closed source and open source and live together, work together, and make the enterprises thrive and prosper.

WSF/PHP with XAMPP, WampServer, Zend Core and Lighttpd

Web services framework for PHP has been tested with PHP5, Zend Core 2.5, WampServer2, XAMPP 1.6.4 and Lithttpd.

Nandika has explained how to get Web services working for XAMPP for Windows. An illustrated guide on installing with XAMPP is also available. Similar set of steps would get the WSF/PHP Windows binary working wit WampServer2.

Mohanjith has explained how he got WSF/PHP working with Lighthttpd. And Nandika has also explained how to get the pecl package working.

You can download the source and binaries from the download page and try out yourself.

WSDL with NuSOAP

Yesterday I blogged about the WSDL generation capabilities of PHP Web services framework.

I found this article on NuSOAP WSDL support. Basically the article describes the WSDL mode equivalent supported by NuSOAP.

NuSOAP as well as WSO2 WSF/PHP are open source projects. NuSOAP comes with LGPL license and is implemented in PHP. WSO2 WSF/PHP is written in C and comes with the Apache 2.0 license.

PHP5 SOAP Extension

I wrote this article sometime back on the PHP5 SOAP extension. It details the classes of extension, two implementation models of Web services, and also lists a 'Hello World with SOAP Extension'.

If you want to compare and contrast PHP5 SOAP extension with WSO2's Web services framework, you can have a look into this article.

Most Exciting Features of Upcoming WSO2 WSF/PHP Release

We have packed and tested WSO2 Web services framework version 1.2.0. Release note will go out next Monday.

I am very excited about this release. The key features to look out for are:

• WSDL generation
  • We have improved the code first model a great deal. This release will have the greatest WSDL generation capabilities that the PHP world has ever seen
• WSDL Mode improvements
  • Now you can provide a WSDL with security policies and the framework is capable of dealing with those policies and enforce them
• Class mapping support for services
  • So far we only supported exposing PHP functions as Web service operations. This release has added support to expose the member functions of a PHP class as service operations
• We also have provided Windows and Linux binaries of the framework that that would work with Zend Core

As always, it is open source (Apache license) and free to download and use as you wish. Download now and enjoy these excitements!!!