I'm delighted to announce that my new book "PHP Web Services" is now available as an early release! [...] The book isn't huge (or expensive, hint!), but it aims to give solid theory in a practical and approachable way. There's the topics you'd expect to see, covering HTTP and verbs and headers and status codes, and also around data formats. It also covers RPC services including SOAP, and also has a chapter (predictably the longest one!) about REST. I've tried to go beyond simply the "how to do" and into the "how to do in a kick-ass manner" realm, so there are chapters about how to design your API and choose what kind to build, how to handle errors, how to make your API really robust - and of course how to debug when things go wrong!

The book not only has the summaries and descriptions of some common web service challenges, but also includes code samples you can use in your own projects.

Just a quickie. Do you ever want to debug an RPC call to XML-RPC or Soap or something like that using Zend Studio/PDT and the Zend Debugger? What I mean is debug the RPC call, not the request making the RPC call. Doing that is actually quite simple. I have some code here to share that I recently (as in 5 minutes ago, used).

His code snippet shows an "if" conditional that sets values on a set of cookies that the Zend Debugger will pick up on and start the debugging process (with settings like start_debug, debug_coverage and debug_start_session. He also explains the four you really need to know about in a bit more detail.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

Got bored tonight, so I wrote an RPC library for PHP5. Going to need some RPC at work soon between two web servers, so instead of doing the sensible thing and using an available XMLRPC library or something similar, I naturally wrote my own. Besides, the recent(ish) serious vulnerabilities in the PEAR XMLRPC library make me hesitant to use it.

He includes a basic implementation of the script (to make a call to get the latest UNIX timestamp), with both the code for the client and server sides.]]> Thu, 23 Feb 2006 06:53:00 -0600