Web services are a great way to link machines and provide data out to a needy public (whether that be internal or external), but getting started with them can sometimes be confusing. Thankfully, there's tutorials like this one from IBM developerWorks to help things along.
This tutorial is for PHP programmers that would like to jump on the Web services bandwagon by creating a Web service in PHP. You'll build a Web service by building a SOAP server in PHP. The Web service you will create will be a vehicle lookup service that takes in queries based on make, model, and year.
There's many different methods one can use to handle the messages for a web service - they decided on SOAP. Obviously, you'll need a working PHP install on an Apache web server before even getting started, and they use a database (Apache Derby) to handle the data on the backend. You'll need to login/create a login to get into it, but once you do, you can follow their steps to the creation of an example client and server for the web service:
- Overview and Setup
- Simple SOAP server in PHP
- Derby: Setting Up
- Architecting the user interface
- The client
- The server
