Further Reading

Interacting with remote services is a broad topic, and there is much more to it than is covered in this chapter. SOAP especially is an evolving standard that is deserving of a book of its own. Here are some additional resources for topics covered in this chapter, broken down by topic.

SOAP

The SOAP specification can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP.

An excellent introduction to SOAP can be found at http://www.soapware.org/bdg.

All of Shane Caraveo's Web services talks at http://talks.php.net provide insight into succeeding with SOAP in PHP. Shane is the principal author of the PHP 5 SOAP implementation.

XML-RPC

The XML-RPC specification can be found at http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec.

Dave Winer, author of XML-RPC, has a nice introduction to it at http://davenet.scripting.com/1998/07/14/xmlRpcForNewbies.

Web Logging

The Blogger API specification is available at http://www.blogger.com/developers/api/1_docs.

The MetaWeblog API specification is available at http://www.xmlrpc.com/metaWeblogApi.

MovableType offers extensions to both the MetaWeblog and Blogger APIs. Its specification is available at http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_programmatic.html.

RSS is an open-XML format for syndicating content. The specification is available at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss.

The Serendipity Web logging system featured in the XML-RPC examples is available at http://www.s9y.org.

Publicly Available Web Services

http://xmethods.net is devoted to developing Web services (primarily SOAP and WSDL). It offers a directory of freely available Web services and encourages interoperability testing.

Amazon has a free SOAP interface. Details are available at http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landing.html.

Google also has a free SOAP search interface. Details are available at http://www.google.com/apis.