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.

The new SDK is built on top of the Guzzle HTTP client framework, which provides increased performance and enables event-driven customization. Each AWS service client extends the Guzzle client and describes operations on the service using a service description file. The SDK now manages persistent connections for both serial and parallel requests. It detects transient network failures, with automatic retries using truncated exponential backoff. Support for event hooks (via the Symfony2 EventDispatcher) allows you to implement custom, event-driven behavior.

In the AWS post about the update, they give you a few code snippets showing this updated version in use. This completely reworked version of the SDK is not compatible with the previous version, so you'll need to consult their migration guide to bring things up to date.

Codeception testing framework got significant improvements during last week. The first and the major one is that you don't even need PEAR and Composer to execute tests. Only one file codecept.phar required. This might save your time and mind of your testers.

They've recently added modules for SOAP and REST support, making it easier to define your tests in a more fluid fashion. Included in the post are two examples, one REST and one SOAP. You can find more information about these new testing features over in the tool's documentation.

The first release supports a large subset of our infrastructure services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SimpleDB, the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), as well as Amazon Identify and Access Management (IAM).

The SDK for PHP includes all of the libraries you'll need to directly access the mentioned services, some code examples to help you get started and some documentation to fill you in on some of the finer points. There's also a few code snippets included in the post to show you a sample SNS connection that creates a topic, subscribes to it and publishes a notification.

About a year ago I was asked by a client to update their existing web service because of some changes in the way they wanted to process their sales data. Luckily this client has always understood the importance of a Service-Oriented Architecture ( SOA ) since they deal with large amounts of resellers who need to access, edit and create data. All I had to do was apply the changes to their web service.

He lists the steps he followed when making the update - thinking about backwards compatibility, evaluating current functionality for use and possibly decommissioning older pieces.

In this world of sharing data, increasing numbers of sites and applications are making information available over web services. Whether we are building a service as a feature of our own development, or pulling in the information published by others, we will need to understand the different service types and how to work with them in PHP. This article aims to give you the tools to do just that.

She starts with the basics every web service developer should know - the HTTP spec - and moves from there into things like RPC services, data formats, SOAP messaging, a few debugging tips and finally one of the more talked about technologies these days - REST.

Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. [...] Cloud-based development involves in some sense, the outsourcing, of various parts of the application out of the server and into the cloud.

Included is an illustration of how an application would interact with the cloud and an example of working with the S3 service that Amazon offers. The example mentions both the normal services and something called the "elastic compute cloud" that lets you use remote services to run virtual instances of other operating systems.

Today's special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey is a regular on PHP Abstract and I've receited his bio enough so that those of you who listen regularly can probably recite along with me. [...] Today Davey is going to talk to us today about Web Services.

As always, you can either pull down the mp3 by itself and listen to the show right away (or use the embedded player for that matter) or you can subscribe to the feed and get this and other great episodes (including a previous vidcast from Davey) delivered right to your desktop.

PHP continues to enjoy phenomenal growth becoming the de-facto standard for enterprise Web applications. With the introduction of PHP 5, PHP has reached new levels of support for Web Services, XML and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) meeting the robust demands of the enterprise environment. Learn how you can achieve scalability, performance, availability and reliability for your enterprise-class PHP applications with advanced PHP solutions from Zend Technologies.

In the webcast, Zeev talks about integrating web services, tracking and improving the response times in your application, scaling your applications, and troubleshooting applications down to the exact line of code.

In line with the roadmap email, I'd like to form 8 new mailing lists which will make it easier for people to discuss/participate in subject areas which are of interest to them (actually 7 new ones as docs already exists).

I did think of calling the lists fwdev-* to note them as dev lists but I think it makes more sense to keep them open to the users. I find it very valuable to get users asking questions and commeting on functionality on the dev lists as that's valuable input from the users.

The new mailing lists up and running. They are:

• fw-webservices@
• fw-mvc@
• fw-auth@
• fw-i18n@
• fw-db@
• fw-core@
• fw-formats@

To check out the topics that fall under each category, check out the sections of the roadmap.