Today's special guest is Graham Charters. Graham works at IBM's development lab in Hursley, England. His past roles have included WebSphere Application Server development, and architecture responsibilities in WebSphere Business Integration, and Adapters. [...] Today Graham is going to talk to us today about the Service Component Architecture, or SCA.

Graham talks about what SCA is and includes a mention of the PECL package that enables PHP applications to work with multiple data sources seamlessly.

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I've just made the first code drop to support calling eBay Web services using the Service Component Architecture. Anyone who's tried calling the eBay soap APIs will know there are quite a few hoops to jump through to get it working. [...] The SCA eBay soap support hides this complexity by allowing you to specify the information as configuration parameters and then it makes sure the right things are placed in the header or the URL.

A code example is included that makes a connection to the web service, calls the GetSearchResults action for the query of "ipod" and, upon getting the results back, loops through them to display them to the page.

We've just made the first release of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) for PHP prototype available. SCA allows you to turn PHP classes into Web services by adding a few simple phpDocumentor-style annotations. SCA will automatically generate WSDL for these services when required.

SCA also uses the same annotations technique to allow PHP classes to declare dependencies on other Web services or PHP classes. At runtime it will then 'inject' proxies for these dependencies, which can then be used to call the Web services or classes

You can check out documentation for the project and some examples of how it works over on this page and a whitepaper here will give you the full scoop. If you're interested, be sure to check out the Google Group for the project too.