We're going to take these concepts [from the previous article] further and add a new one: REST. In the course of this series so far, we've only been discussing how to use the Router to examine and act on different parts of a URL.

He gives a list of possible headers that could come from a client (like Accept-Charset or Content-Type) and how these can be directly pulled in to the CakePHP routing system. A few extra bits of code later and your app can be mapping requests directly to the controllers for the actions the user's requesting. All that's left is to serialize the results back into XML to echo out.

Learn how to build Web services in PHP using the PHP Development Tools plug-in in Eclipse Europa. Become familiar with the PDT project, and learn how to create and deploy useful PHP projects, learn about the philosophy behind contract-first development, and understand the basic parts that make up a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file.

You'll have to register/sign in to get to it. They give an introduction to the PHP Development Tools for Eclipse, creating a WSDL file visually in the IDE and integrating it all to work with your Eclipse front-end.

Whether you're an enterprise developer working in a large shop or setting up a blog for yourself, you've almost certainly been tasked with keeping your development code in sync with some type of stable release. Whether a project is big or small, you still need to ensure that the core code you work with remains consistent.

The tutorial walks you through the setup of a basic AIR application, how to pull the configuration XML into it and parsing it to use in the interface. The next step is the sync, grabbing your config and pushing it out to other multiple configs across your sites (via a REST service).

Web services are the coolest technology I know of that ends up turning everyone off. I don't know about you, but when I go to a lecture on Web services, invariably tons of acronyms come out [...] and then I start to nod off and dream about a land where free Krispy Kreme donuts grow on trees.

He reframes the web services world away from the acronyms and strict standards to more towards using it as a method of communication between apps, letting them engage in some friendly conversation. He uses the rest of the tutorial showing how to create an RSS reader of sorts using dashes of PEAR, XML, C#, XSLT, Ajax and Flex.

I recently came by this site WorldTimeEngine where users can search the local time of any place using the name, street address or just latitude and longitude. Since that time I was thinking how easily you can make your own. As long there are some good people over there (For Geocoding API) - its a not a big deal, you know?

His script pulls the location of the place (latitude/longitude) from the Yahoo! geocoding API and passes that back into the geonames web service to get the local time. The result is an array with the lat/long, address you submitted and the time output in a standard string.

I was recently working on a project to expose our trading systems via XmlRpc, Rest and SOAP. It was quite an interesting project, which took two of us three weeks to develop (Amongst other things).

He talks about some of the issues they worked through (like the ZF's "not quite ready" in the web services department) and problems they found with how the web services functionality was implemented in the framework's components. They also came across two strange bugs - one with accepting raw input and the other with a wrong return type from a method call.

This last installment of the series will be entirely focused on demonstrating how Inheritance can be used in a helpful way to build a set of child classes that will come in handy for consuming a specific Yahoo! Search Service.

They show how to use their current image search functionality and, with a few modifications, make a base class that can be used to support ech of the other search types (web, image, video) with common functionality and settings.

Logically, these examples can be really useful for learning the basic concepts surrounding the use of these search services, but undoubtedly, it's necessary to modify and improve their source code to make it more compact and completely reusable.

They start the overhaul with the web search (complete with example results) then push on to the video and image searches and work them over the same way.

In this third chapter of the series, I'm going to continue exploring in detail other helpful web services offered by Yahoo!, such as those focusing on searching images and videos. Also, I will demonstrate how they can be queried directly from a basic PHP 5 application and process the corresponding search results by utilizing the same group of array handling functions that you saw in the previous article of the series.

Just like in previous articles of the series, they make a simple class that connect to the Yahoo! web services and request search details back about their queries (like "Madonna").

I'll show you how to parse the results returned by a determined web search service using a few array PHP processing functions. [...] Let's learn how to fetch results returned by the different Yahoo! Search Web Services in the form of serialized PHP arrays

You'll probably want to check out part one of the series before forging on to this second installment - there's a lot of good introductory information in there. With all of that information ingested, you'll have no problem following along with this next part.

They show how to get the results back from a search in an XML format and how, with the simple addition of an optional "output" parameter, can get the same information back in something PHP can natively use (the arrays).