In this recent post to his site Gonzalo Ayuso shows how to use the Symfony2 service container to interact directly with the Twitter API via an OAuth plugin.

If we are working within a Symfony2 application or a PHP application that uses the Symfony's Dependency injection container component you can easily integrate this simple script in the service container. I will show you the way that I use to do it.

His sample code uses the Guzzle HTTP library and some configuration options from a YAML file to create a new service hooked into the Twitter API with his credentials. He then imports it via his services configuration and shows an example of it in action - getting the latest contents of his timeline.

The Amazon Web Services group has recently released an updated version of their SDK for PHP and at it's heart is the open source project Guzzle (a HTTP client framework).

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.

Michael Dowling tipped us off to Guzzle, a RESTful web service client framework that lets you build testable web service clients quickly and easily.

Guzzle helps you speed up the process of creating a RESTful web service client by giving you full control of HTTP requests and access to advanced features like persistent HTTP connections, parallel requests, exponential backoff, over the wire logging, MD5 validation, cookie jars, and a caching forward proxy.

Installing the framework is as easy as grabbing the phar archive and including it in your application. Some sample code examples are included right on the front page - a simple client pulling down an XML file, grabbing Amazon S3 content, working with the HTTP request on a finer scale and making parallel requests.