I’m needing to build a web service that will interact with a desktop application. It'll communicate between this and my MySQL database.

I did this once using NuSOAP but that was 10 years ago. What’s the best way of doing this now?

    These days most Web APIs send JSON back and forth. Each URL corresponds to a particular API endpoint.

      Any good resource on how to get started so I can post data from my desktop application

      nzkiwi80 Any good resource...

      I think there are a whole lot of "it depends" to answer that. How big/small, simple/complex will the application and the data be? Will it need to deal with user authentication, and if so, what sort? I could imagine anything between writing up a few PHP files in one afternoon, to using something like laravel-json-api (or similar framework) as the foundation.

          As the others have stated, there are a lot of things that might affect the effort involved here. You've mentioned a desktop application -- you might start there by having your desktop app send some info to a PHP end point hosted on a server. You can read the PHP docs to get a good basic idea of GET, POST, and REQUEST.

          If you want to jump straight into some framework, NogDog has suggested using Laravel, which is quite popular. In my experience, Laravel is quite heavy (just installing the framework brings in over 500,000 lines of code), and it requires you to learn 'the laravel way' of doing things.

          I've done numerous projects using CodeIgniter, which is quite lightweight and has its own quirks. Lately, I've had my doubts about its long-term viability, however.

          sneakyimp Laravel is quite heavy

          Well, I was trying to show opposite ends of the spectrum. 😉

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