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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n my role as eBay Platform Evangelist, I spend a lot of time exploring different XML technologies. SOAP is obviously the big one. No, it's not PEAR::SOAP or NuSOAP; it's axis2.

He talks a bit about what axis2 is and the need it fills in the web services world. He also talks about how it's been developed (not copied after SOAP, but more of a fresh start that happens to do the same things). After this quick look at axis2, though, he gets into the head of the post - SDO.

The other PHP XML extension I've been hearing a lot about is SDO. SDO is an attempt to provide a standard data interface regardless of the backend datasource. So, for example, you can interact with XML data in the exact same manner as information pulled from your database.

Adam decided to give it a try and see how it interacted with the eBay API with some simple code examples. The first of which looks through eBay Motors and finds the title and mileage for each of the items grabbed. It worked well, and didn't require too much more development than the SOAP predecesor, but there were a few quirks that made things a bit more difficult (like SDO's inability to completely consume a WSDL file and understand a SOAP service's functionality).

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.

I was just skimming over Santos' Post about SDO, and was saddened to see more anecdotes and less facts.

Specifically, he mentions two points - one dealing with the definition Jacob gave for the functionality and the other pointing out some better stats that Jscob didn't include in his comments.

Developers will eventually start using it, it will take some time to go from the PHP way to SDO way. It would be easier to jump into SDO once better, more easily interpreted and simple to understand tutorials, code samples, and support is available. IBM tutorials are a little bit technical, with words and complex pictures (UML). Just give me code and explain how it works and let me run with the SDO scissors in my hand.

He talks about the contributions that both Zend and IBM have made to the effort and the lack of features (well, the duplication of current PHP features - XML and database functionality). He has a positive outlook for the overall future of the project, stating that:

I'm quite sure that enough PHP developers are going to embrace SDO in the coming years depending on the coverage it gets that IBM and Zend's investment will pay off in the end.

There's also mention of another article, "Streamline working with XML in PHP using Service Data Objects", that talks some about SDO close to the end, a look at the merging of XML and SDO. Also, if you're interested in contributing to the SDO project, there's a COntributor License Agreement that you'll need to go through to get into the project.

The conference was very well organised and there were a good number of very interesting talks. They don't appear to be available on the conference site, but Chris Shiflett's blog has a list of quite a few that are available elsewhere.

You can get more of the slides and information on the presentations from this year's edition from their official site or the gathering he mentions over on Chris' blog.

At last month's Zend Conference I was fortunate enough to attend Christian Wenz's tutorial on XML and Web services. This covered the use of technologies such as DOM and SimpleXML for working with XML data. As the title of this blog entry suggests, SDO provide a simple way to construct or extend XML documents.

The example below shows an XML schema used by an application which records information regarding quotations people have made. An XML document following this schema will contain a quotes element containing a number of quote elements, each of which consists of a phrase and an author element and a year attribute.

The code given is less than ten lines long, and is even shorter (by six lines) than a DOM method for doing the same thing - besides being more inuitive...]]> Fri, 25 Nov 2005 06:55:11 -0600