If you've been wanting to get into the "web services" game, but didn't know where to start, there might be a new piece that would interest you.

Over on phpPatterns.com this morning, there's a new article that gives a pretty good introduction to using PEAR::SOAP to "consume web services" on your site. Using this class from the PEAR libraries makes it pretty simple to grab a WSDL resource, parse it into the information it contains, and the grab just the content you might need. That's basically all that this article shows you how to do, but it's a good place to start.

I think as web services become more and more a part of backend operations at companies, you'll see a more standard language evolve about them, and a nice simple (standard) way to create them can't be far behind. I'm curious how many companies out there use a "web service" as part of their day-to-day operations...