[Resolved] Web Services in PHP

[jcarver]

I am looking for ways to implement web services, and I wanted to hear how other people have done it. Historically, I've just done standard PHP scripts.

More background on what I want to implement:
I basically want to build a data-distribution engine (server-to-server). I want to keep my options open on whether I am pushing the data to them (say monthly or when I get a data update) or they pull the data from me (they poll my servers whenever they want). I expect I will also end up having to help my clients build the interfaces on their side.

It seems like my options are mainly C# in .NET (which I would like to avoid, just because it's MS) and J2EE. I suppose I could find ways of doing it in PHP, but it doesn't seem naturally supported (I've always used it to interact with my database to produce web pages).

If you know of sites where I could learn how to do this, or of technologies/libraries that would aid me in this, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!
Jason

[drawmack]

Look into using SOAP, which PHP does support (http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/)

Another good one is RSS (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss)

If you're looking into pushing the data then ftp or sockets are probably the way to go and php has a vast array of ftp and socket functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.ftp.php, http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.sockets.php)

[superwormy]

Web Services really arn't anything that special... you could easily implement an XML-RPC or SOAP server in PHP, or find someone whos already done it for you ( nuSOAP, XML-RPC PHP project )

Web services really arn't any different then generating HTML pages, you're just recieving and generating XML instead.

[jcarver]

I really appreciate the help. That's definitely enough to get me going.

Thanks Again!
Jason