Archive for category Web Service

Zend Framework 1.6 RC1 with WSDL AutoDiscovery

Zend Framework's new release 1.6 is in it's RC1 stage now. It has got many exiting features, including one of the much waited WSDL auto-generation using Zend_Soap_AutoDiscover class. It will automatically generate WSDL based on your class definition based on PHP Documentation.

I am not sure why it is taking long with PHP to have WSDL auto-generation feature? May be loose typing..!

Anyway current implementation of Zend's WSDL generation with Zend_Soap_AutoDiscover doesn't seems to be perfect. It is having issues with Complex Type. Although you can manually generate WSDL with the help of Zend_Soap_Wsdl.

When I tried with AutoDiscovery feature results were surprising for Complex Type, behavior of generator was weired. Let's hope that Zend will fix issues with this great feature before their final release. Documentation is also in it's building stage and needs more examples and better compilation. Download Zend Framework from here, and try with tar.gz, it looks like zip is not working for me (more than once) with current compilation due to some reason.

Previously I have used WSDL generator class from jool.nl, it was quite handy and easy to configure and uses Reflections to generate WSDL from PHP Docs just like Zend Framework.

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My experiences with SOAP Web-service PHP vs .NET

Recently I have been developing web-services for integration of one of our flagship product to other POS software at Meditab Software. My official working platform is PHP and we have been developing web services for communication between our products to internal web applications in the past but it was like "We understand what we speak..!" as we have not been dealing with any external entity during these communications the input parameters used to be simple data-types and for output we understand what we give back using single simple data-type.

When I read requirement specification for the web service which I have developed recently I thought I could finish it in a day or two as I have been developing web-services recently. I went on and started and went into trouble with "complexType" declaration in WSDL. I was having C# example to work with provided by the company which was going to use my webservice. I tried that but the thing is when you use Microsoft ASP.NET platform to develop web services what developer needs to is just expose their method with [WebMethod] attribute and you are done! All hardwork and complex WSDL generation will be done by .NET framework. But when it comes to PHP you gotta deal with WSDL generation and make sure you do it perfectly or else your web-service won't work. Read the rest of this entry »

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