TopWebNews.com has posted a new tutorial today covering the creation and use of web services in PHP.

In this tutorial, I will be demonstrating how to use the SOAP package from PEAR to query Google's extensive database. This tutorial assumes that you are using PHP 4 or higher and PEAR::SOAP 0.8.1, and requires basic familiarity with PHP (including a little object-oriented programming).

He starts with the setup and configuration of the PEAR SOAP module to make the requests over to Google's backend. He also points you to the page to get a license key.

From there, it's all about the messages back and forth - decoding the WSDL file and sending the spell check request with the SOAP module. He even mentions a common issue some SOAP users will see - the value 'Object' instead of the correct return value (and, of course, how to correct it).