Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post sharing some of the details about using RPC and HAL in the Apigility API tool from Zend. HAL stands for "Hypermedia Access Language" and basically provides a way to define objects in an API and what they relate to.

A few days ago, we released our first beta of Apigility. We've started our documentation effort now, and one question has arisen a few times that I want to address: How can you use Hypermedia Application Language (HAL) in RPC services? Hypermedia Application Language is an IETF proposal for how to represent resources and their relations within APIs. Technically, it provides two mediatypes, application/hal+json and application/hal+xml; however, Apigility only provides the JSON variant.

He introduces some of the basics of HAL and includes an example of JSON output showing metadata about the current object such as a full link to the resource. He also includes an example of the "embedded" data, additional related data, other objects, with their own structure and links. He also briefly mentions what RPC is and how it works before getting into how to set up the endpoints in your Apigility API with the help of "ContentNegotiation" functionality.

Lorna Mitchell has officially announced the release of her O'Reilly-published book about creating and working with web services in PHP, PHP Web Services.

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.

In a quick new post to his blog today Kevin Schroeder shows you how to debug an RPC call in your Zend Framework application.

Just a quickie. Do you ever want to debug an RPC call to XML-RPC or Soap or something like that using Zend Studio/PDT and the Zend Debugger? What I mean is debug the RPC call, not the request making the RPC call. Doing that is actually quite simple. I have some code here to share that I recently (as in 5 minutes ago, used).

His code snippet shows an "if" conditional that sets values on a set of cookies that the Zend Debugger will pick up on and start the debugging process (with settings like start_debug, debug_coverage and debug_start_session. He also explains the four you really need to know about in a bit more detail.

Joshua Eichorn mentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

Joshua Eichorn mentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

This new post on Richard Heyes' blog today walks through an RPC library that he created for PHP5.

Got bored tonight, so I wrote an RPC library for PHP5. Going to need some RPC at work soon between two web servers, so instead of doing the sensible thing and using an available XMLRPC library or something similar, I naturally wrote my own. Besides, the recent(ish) serious vulnerabilities in the PEAR XMLRPC library make me hesitant to use it.

He includes a basic implementation of the script (to make a call to get the latest UNIX timestamp), with both the code for the client and server sides.

This new post on Richard Heyes' blog today walks through an RPC library that he created for PHP5.

Got bored tonight, so I wrote an RPC library for PHP5. Going to need some RPC at work soon between two web servers, so instead of doing the sensible thing and using an available XMLRPC library or something similar, I naturally wrote my own. Besides, the recent(ish) serious vulnerabilities in the PEAR XMLRPC library make me hesitant to use it.

He includes a basic implementation of the script (to make a call to get the latest UNIX timestamp), with both the code for the client and server sides.