Jordi Boggiano has posted some excellent news for all of the Composer users out there - the widely popular dependency management tool has officially "gone gold" and has tagged the stable v1.0.0 version of the tool.

Five years ago today, Composer was born. In some ways it feels like yesterday, at least it doesn't feel like five years went by. In other ways it seems like a lifetime ago, and I can barely remember what it was like to write PHP code without having a whole ecosystem at my fingertips.

Jordi talks about one big change that happened recently around the "self-update" feature of the tool. He hopes that more people will use the preview or snapshot channels in their deploys/development so he can get more information about these other options before they get to stable. Finally, to mark the occasion Jordi has put a "gold" copy (on floppy disk none the less) up for sale on eBay to commemorate the release.

The SitePoint blog has posted the next part of their "using the eBay trading API" series today (part three) showing you how to add products to your store via their API.

In this third and final part of our eBay Trading API series, we’ll be building the product adding functionality into our application. Now that we’re done with the store settings, we can begin with writing the code for the controller that would handle the creation of products.

He walks you through the code to create the "new" action on your Slim controller, build the view to gather the product information and handle the upload of product images with the Dropzone Javascript library. Also included is the code to get the current category list (to populate a dropdown list) and the code needed to create the product, both in your database and sending it back to the eBay API for insertion. This finishes the series about using this API, but you can get more information on the API itself though its documentation. The full code for the tutorial series is available on GitHub.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the next article in their "eBay Trading API" tutorial series today. In this new tutorial they show you how to configure your store's settings.

In part 1, we explained the different parts of eBay’s developer dashboard and configured our test application. We also created our database. Now we’re ready to create a project. In this part, we’ll focus on store settings. In part 3, we’ll add new products to our store.

They include the "composer.json" contents you'll need to install all of the libraries they'll use for the tutorial. With those installed they start in on the code, creating a basic Slim application that uses Twig views and some custom configuration options. Then he starts in on the classes, creating an "Ebay" class to handle the application settings and creating a "post" method to handle the API request. He adds in a few other helper methods and builds a database object/query to get the application details from the database. Next up are the templates for the main page and the controller to handle the default, session and token requests. He adds in some additional route configurations, makes a "view action" for the store settings and to request the user preferences from the API.

The SitePoint PHP blog they've posted the first part of a new series about using the eBay API as a part of a product management application. In part one they start by getting things set up on the eBay trading API and creating the database you'll need for the rest of the series.

In this tutorial series, I’ll walk you through Ebay’s Trading API. The Trading API allows you to build applications that can be used for selling in Ebay. Here are some examples of things you can do with the API: retrieve store information, update store preferences, add products to a specific eBay store, end product listings, update product price and retrieve product information. In this tutorial, we’ll be creating an app that allows users to create a product on eBay through the use of the API.

They start by helping you register an application on the eBay developer site and configure the settings to match your needs. They link to some of the tools you can use during your development and some of the headers/content you'll need to set to make your requests. The tutorial wraps up with the SQL needed to create the database backend for your store's settings, products, listings and some sample data to insert.

From the phpblog on the IBM developerWorks website today, there's a quick new tutorial focusing on the use of the Service Component Architecture functionality in PHP to interface with the web service API that eBay offers.

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.

From the phpblog on the IBM developerWorks website today, there's a quick new tutorial focusing on the use of the Service Component Architecture functionality in PHP to interface with the web service API that eBay offers.

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.

In his latest blog post, Adam Trachtenberg looks into the world of web services and comes out with three topics - SOAP, axis2, and SDO. He chooses to focus, though, on the last of these after working with it to really get a feel for what it can do.

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).

In his latest blog post, Adam Trachtenberg looks into the world of web services and comes out with three topics - SOAP, axis2, and SDO. He chooses to focus, though, on the last of these after working with it to really get a feel for what it can do.

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).

It's the book everyone's talking about and the entire PHP community should by! Okay, really, there's a few blog posts about it, but it's definitely not one to pass up if you need a quality recource on using web APIs in PHP - Paul Reinheimer's "Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds".

Chris Shiflett comments on his blog that, though he hasn't read it yet:

I know Paul has been working on it for well over a year, and it has already received a positive review from Nathan Smith.

The review gives praise to the book, noting that it provides good examples and helpful tutorials for each of the APIs talked about. The book covers its subject well without trying to "spread itself too thin" by including too much and not focusing on its core - APIs like eBay, Google, FedEx, Flickr, even the National Weather Service.

Even Paul himself comments on the occasion, mentioning what his intentions for the book were and how it changed along the way.

It's the book everyone's talking about and the entire PHP community should by! Okay, really, there's a few blog posts about it, but it's definitely not one to pass up if you need a quality recource on using web APIs in PHP - Paul Reinheimer's "Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds".

Chris Shiflett comments on his blog that, though he hasn't read it yet:

I know Paul has been working on it for well over a year, and it has already received a positive review from Nathan Smith.

The review gives praise to the book, noting that it provides good examples and helpful tutorials for each of the APIs talked about. The book covers its subject well without trying to "spread itself too thin" by including too much and not focusing on its core - APIs like eBay, Google, FedEx, Flickr, even the National Weather Service.

Even Paul himself comments on the occasion, mentioning what his intentions for the book were and how it changed along the way.