In his "newbie findings" posted to his blog today, David Goodwin recounts his efforts to get SOAP an XML-RPC up and working with his PHP5 project and the wealth of documentation he found.

I'm no great expert on the inner workings of these protocols....there are probably secret manuals on SOAP/XmlRpc etc I/we failed to read somewhere. This is just a documentation of what I/we as "newbies" found ...

Resources in the list include things like the SCA SDO module from PECL, some examples of its usage, where it is used, what kind of transport layer the protocol allows and some of the functionality that the Zend Framework allows (including some sample code for a simple server and client).

Andrew Johnstone has a new post today with a look at a project he'd worked on - an implementation of a web service with the Zend Framework functionality.

I was recently working on a project to expose our trading systems via XmlRpc, Rest and SOAP. It was quite an interesting project, which took two of us three weeks to develop (Amongst other things).

He talks about some of the issues they worked through (like the ZF's "not quite ready" in the web services department) and problems they found with how the web services functionality was implemented in the framework's components. They also came across two strange bugs - one with accepting raw input and the other with a wrong return type from a method call.

On O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website, there's a new tutorial by Deepak Vohra about the creation of web services with PHP, two different kinds - a SOAP service (and client) and an XML-RPC web service.

A web service consists of a server to serve requests to the web service and a client to invoke methods on the web service. The PHP class library provides the SOAP extension to develop SOAP servers and clients and the XML-RPC extension to create XML-RPC servers and clients. Before I delve further into developing web services with PHP, I shall briefly discuss web services.

HE starts with the SOAP service, using the functionality from the php_soap module to create a simple SOAP server (including the creation of a WSDL file, example included). The other side of things is included as well - a SOAP client that makes a request for items from a certain catalog and outputs to a page.

He uses the XML-RPC functionality to make the same type of service (with the same data) and includes the request and response XML for their request for the "hello" message the server responds with.

Secunia has posted a vulnerability marked as "highly critical" for users of any of the Avaya products that use PHP:

Avaya has acknowledged some vulnerabilities in various Avaya products, where some have unknown impacts and others can be exploited by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions and potentially by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.

The following products are affected:

• Avaya Communication Manager (CM 4.0 and CM 2.x prior to load 127.0)
• Avaya CCS/SES (CCS/SES 3.1.1)
• Avaya AES (AES 4.0)

Currently, according to the original announcement from Avaya, there are two issues that have been found and are able to be exploited - an issue with the xmlrpc extension and a problem with the ftp extension. Currently, there is no patch to correct these issues, but you can keep track of their current status via their entries

The PHP-GTK Community website has three new posts today - two concerning pieces of PHP-GTK software and one with news about the new RPC services the website offers.

First off is a look at the emuControlCenter software (version 0.9), a rom-manager for console and computer games:

emuControlCenter (ecc) is a rom-manager for retro and new console/computer games. ecc is build for people who want's to play retro games quick 'n' easy, without searching to much, ECC supports images and previews them directy in the 'Resultview'. Also there is a 'ImageCenter' build-in for a fullsize preview!

Next up is the PHP_Gtk Builderthis site for more information.

Finally, there's some information posted about the new web service offered by the site:

Starting today, the community site exposes a new XML-RPC service offering access to its daily statistics, in addition to the existing geo_nick API.

They include the list of information pages on getting started and using the API (like the access_stats API and a tutorial on getting started with PHP-GTK and the geo_nick service).

WordPress users listen up! Justin Silverton has pointed out a new update for your favorite blogging software to help keep things secure.

From the WordPress site:

These releases include fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue, and a proactive full sweep of the WordPress codebase to protect against future problems.

There's also a mention of the added security they've implemented to help protect from something like this previous issue happening again.

Download the files directly:

• for version 2.1.3
• for version 2.0.10

On the PHP-GTK Community Site today, there's a quick new tutorial posted on how to use the Zend Framework (the Zend_XmlRpc_Client component specifically) to work with the geo-nick web service.

Closing the tour of XML-RPC implementations usable with PHP-GTK, the shortest code to access our geo_nick service makes use a higher-level XML-RPC library: the Zend_XmlRpc_Client from the Zend Framework.

They include the code you'll need to get started, including the creation of the client and making the request to the remote service.

In a new post today, Mike Naberezny talks about some updates that have been made to the XML-RPC client included with the Zend Framework, spotlighting three items in particular.

A few weeks ago, I rewrote the Zend XML-RPC client as part of a customer project at Maintainable. After fixing a fair number of bugs and writing a test suite, I made some enhancements and usability improvements. You can learn more about the new XML-RPC client from its documentation.

The three new updates to the package deal with:

• Calling remote methods (a new call() method)
• Server proxy objects have been added
• Faults are thrown as PHP exceptions

As mentioned over on the Zend Developer Zone, the IBM developerWorks website has posted a a new tutorial with a hand-holding guide to the creation of your own PEAR channels.

This tutorial discusses channels, introduces and explains the channel.xml file, and demonstrates how to build a channel for distributing packages. Channels are ordinarily used to expose PEAR packages through the Internet, but enterprises can uses channels to make distribution of enterprise-specific PHP code easy.

You'll need to log in to the IBM developerWorks website to get to the good stuff (you do have a login, don't you?), but once you do, you'll find a guide that goes through:

• what PEAR is and what PEAR channels are
• channel management (including the channel.xml file)
• building the XML-RPC methods
• publishing the channel
• installing and upgrading a test package
• and some troubleshooting hints and further resources

With another new log from their IRC talk series, the PHP ThinkTank group has posted this new talk as given by Davey Shafik on the topic of web services.

The talk focuses mostly on the web service abilities of the Zend Framework (a module Davey helped with) and includes examples of things like XML-RPC connections and SOAP connections.

You can check out this and the logs from the other IRC talks the group has done on the group's website.