Chapter 12. Talking with other applications

 

This chapter covers

  • An introduction to web services
  • How to create and consume an RSS feed with Zend_Feed
  • Integrating a Zend_XmlRpc server into a Zend Framework application
  • Creating a REST server using Zend_Rest

This chapter will cover the use of various components of Zend Framework that can be loosely lumped together under the term “web services,” which the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines as “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.” For the sake of simplicity, we’ll base our use of the term “web services” in this chapter on that definition, rather than on the more specific W3C focus on it being a combination of SOAP and WSDL (Web Services Description Language).

Part of that interoperation includes the use of XML, but one of the benefits of using these components is that we don’t need to focus on XML itself. Zend Framework provides a series of tools that takes care of the formatting and protocol of the interaction, leaving you to focus on the logic using only PHP. If you take a moment to list all the formats available just for web newsfeeds, the benefits of not having to deal with that range of formats and their rate of change will be obvious.

Before we get into using the Zend Framework components, we’ll take a look at how we can and why we would integrate applications using web services.

12.1. Integrating Applications

12.2. Producing and Consuming Feeds with Zend_Feed

12.3. Making RPCs with Zend_XmlRpc

12.4. Using REST Web Services with Zend_Rest

12.5. Summary