RESTful PHP Web Services – Book

My book on RESTful PHP Web Services is now available for download from Packt Publishing.

What you will learn from this book

• Basic concepts of REST architecture
• Consuming public REST-style services from your PHP applications
• Consuming RESTful web services, such as those from leading APIs such as Flickr, and Yahoo Web Search
• Making your own PHP applications accessible to other applications through a RESTful API
• REST support in the popular Zend framework
• Debugging RESTful services and clients
• A case study of designing a RESTful PHP service from the ground up, and designing clients to consume the service

It is also note worthy that there is a dedicated appendix chapter in this book on using WSO2 WSF/PHP.

Web Services Interoperability Expanding

WSO2 Web services framework for PHP (WSF/PHP) was featured on Microsoft TechEd in June. And now, the contours of interoperability is expanding.

Interoperability does not come easy. It comes with so much of effort. We at WSO2 have spent years and years to make it real. And would strive to do so. That is to help users. So that, when they use Web services to interop, they would not have to worry about a thing.

Happy Interop!!!

WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP 1.2.0 Released

WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP 1.2.0 Released. You can find the complete release note on the forum.

There are many exciting features in this latest WSF/PHP release.

Download now and enjoy the power of Web services with PHP.

.NET and PHP in SOA

Can a .NET application talk to a PHP application? Can a PHP application talk to a .NET application? Yes for both cases. But, how? Well there could be multiple ways, but the most obvious answer is with Web services.

Ok, so I can use PHP5 SOAP extension and get the job done? Yes to some extent. With PHP5 SOAP extension you can get started. However, if you use WSO2 Web services framework for PHP, you can do more.

Do more in the sense? In addition to SOAP, you can get .NET and PHP to exchange binary data attachments as well as secure messages that are signed or encrypted or both.

In short, they are interoperable.

Most Exciting SOA Features of WSO2 WSF/PHP 1.2.0 Release

We have packed and tested WSO2 Web services framework version 1.2.0. Release note will go out next Monday.

I am very excited about this release, because it has improved support for loose coupling and interoperability. Always, clean interfacing is welcome when interconnecting services. This release has put some considerable effort to improve the integration with enhanced WSDL support. The key SOA friendly features to look out for are:

• WSDL generation
  • We have improved the code first model a great deal. This release will have the greatest WSDL generation capabilities that the PHP world has ever seen
• WSDL Mode improvements
  • Now you can provide a WSDL with security policies and the framework is capable of dealing with those policies and enforce them

As always, it is open source (Apache 2.0  license) and free to download and use as you wish. Download now and enjoy these excitements!!!

SOA with Ruby

WSO2 Web Services Framework for Ruby 1.0.0 was released this week. This adds comprehensive WS-* support to Ruby, enabling Ruby to be used in SOA implementations that would accomplish the need to inter-operate with heterogeneous implementations such as those in Java and .NET.

This Ruby Web services framework is based on the C Web services framework. That too released its latest version 1.2.0 this week.

Customizing Service Endpoints with Apache Axis2/C

My latest article on OT is on “Web Services Endpoints with Apache Axis2/C”. Provides a detailed descriptions on customizing the endpoint address format of hosted Web services with Apache Axis2/C, the Web services engine for providing and consuming Web Services in C.
With these improved features, Apache Axis2/C is gradually becoming an important SOA tool.

SOA – Just do It

Interesting blog on Just doing SOA. 

More inclined to the .NET side but still interesting.

SOA Tool for C Fans

Web services is the most popular implementation technology for SOA. All those C fans lacked a comprehensive Web services stack all this time. Yes we have some projects supporting Web services, but most of those lack breadth when it comes to WS-* coverage. WSO2 WSF/C team has announced the release of version 1.0.0 of the Web services framework, that is promising to fill in this gap.

Let me quote form the docs that I myself wrote.

WSO2 Web Services Framework/C (WSO2 WSF/C) is a standards compliant, enterprise grade, open source, C library for providing and consuming Web services in C. WSO2 WSF/C is a complete solution for building and deploying Web services, and is the C library with the widest range of WS-* specification implementations, including MTOM, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Reliable Messaging and WS-eventing. It provides the best interoperability- all the Web services specification implementations are tested for interoperability with Microsoft .NET, WSO2 WSAS and other J2EE implementations

WSO2 WSF/C is promising in the C language space as a SOA tool because it allows seamless integration of C applications to other elements in your SOA. It can be used as an SOA enabler.

This project is based on Apache Axis2/C family of projects.

For me, the most important aspects of WSO2 WSF/C are that it is open source and it is comprehensive. It is going to be a promising open source project in C land, and is already being used by WSO2 WSF/PHP to provide Web services support for PHP. And it can be used to enable Web services with other scripting languages such as Perl, Python or Ruby. Thus WSO2 WSF/C provides you with much needed freedom of choice when it comes to the implementation technology in your SOA. It does not matter if you want to use PHP or Perl in your implementation, because WSO2 WSF/C as the Web service enabler underneath, would deliver you the desired SOA characteristics such as interoperability.

Apache Axis2/C 1.0.0 Released

Apache Axis2/C Team is pleased to announce the release of Apache Axis2/C version 1.0.0
You can download this release from
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/c/download.cgi

Key Features

1. Support for one-way messaging (In-Only) and request response messaging (In-Out)
2. Client APIs: Easy to use service client API and more advanced operation client API
3. Transports supported: HTTP
a. Inbuilt HTTP server called simple axis server
b. Apache2 httpd module called mod_axis2 for server side
c. IIS module for server side
d. Client transport with ability to enable SSL support
e. libcurl based client transport
4. Module architecture, mechanism to extend the SOAP processing model
5. WS-Addressing support, both the submission (2004/08) and final (2005/08) versions, implemented as a module
6. MTOM/XOP support
7. AXIOM, an XML object model optimized for SOAP 1.1/1.2 messages; This has complete XML infoset support
8. XML parser abstraction
a. Libxml2 wrapper
b. Guththila pull parser support
9. Both directory based and archive based deployment models for deploying services and modules
10. Description hierarchy providing access to static data of Axis2/C runtime (configuration, service groups, services, operations and messages)
11. Context hierarchy providing access to dynamic Axis2/C runtime information(corresponding contexts to map to each level of description hierarchy)
12. Message receiver abstraction
a. Inbuilt raw XML message receiver
13. Code generation tool for stub and skeleton generation for a given WSDL (based on Java tool)
a. Axis Data Binding (ADB) support
14. Transport proxy support
15. REST support (more POX like) using both HTTP POST and GET
16. Comprehensive documentation
a. Axis2/C Manual

Major Changes Since Last Release

1. Many Bug Fixes
2. IIS module for server side
3. libcurl based client transport
4. Improvements to overall API to make it more user friendly, stable and binary compatible
5. Transport proxy support
6. Memory leak fixes

We welcome your early feedback on this implementation.
Thank you for your interest in Axis2/C.

– Apache Axis2/C Team –