Web Services with SOAP for PHP and C++

SOA with Web Services (SOAP, etc.) is currently very popular technology. So, how is the support of the technology in the most popular development environments - the web one (PHP) and the desktop/server one (Windows, Visual Studio)?

The PHP has got some built-in (but limited) support for SOAP. If you have a choice and possibility to install PHP extensions, probably the much better choice is the WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP.

The strange scenario is with the Microsoft Visual Studio support for Web Services. The Microsoft has decided to abandon the SOAP Toolkit in favor of .NET's Windows Communication Foundation.

"Fortunately" the company is going to extend its native support for Web Services. In the Windows 7 there is a new Windows Web Services API which will be available also for XP and Vista. If you can't wait, the gSOAP seems to be the best solution so far, or to use the commercial components like IP*Works!.

Tomek

IDE for PHP and the frameworks

A few days ago I have been doing a quick research on the PHP frameworks and IDEs for PHP. Well, it seems there is only one most advanced IDE with a framework and the IDE is commercial - Embarcadero Delphi for PHP.

There are a few good and bad things about the IDE. The good thing is that Delphi for PHP is based on the VCL for PHP framework which is an open source project (LGPL). The bad ones are that the VCL may be not so free in the future editions and the IDE itself seems to be a bit buggy. I have also read some posts about some performance issues and in my case the IDE (the trial which I had downloaded from the Embarcadero website) has been crashing often.

So, I have decided to look around for the other tools and my choice goes to the free Eclipse PHP Development Tools. Regarding the frameworks I would choose the Zend Framework ("more commercial") or the Symfony ("more open-source" and advanced).

If you are going to use the Eclipse PDT, you may need to integrate the IDE with a PHP debugger. I did it with the xdebug (an open source) and XAMPP. XAMPP has already built-in xdebug (you don't need to download any debugger from any other vendor). Just don't forget that xdebug does not work with the Zend Optimizer or any other Zend extension (you may have to comment out the extensions in the XAMPP's php.ini).

Tomek