In his latest post, Davey Shafik talks about a web service client that he's been working up for the Zend Framework, specifically dealing with the consuming and creation of REST services.

I am currently working on a ton of Web Services related things for the Zend Framework, one of my favorite, is the almost complete, Zend_Rest_Client. This is a replacement for Zend_Rest (as we're adding a server also).

Whilst it is almost impossible to emulate the PHP 5 SOAP extension, it is still possible to get a nice interface.

He gives some examples of its usage:

• creating a client with three lines of code
• showing off the "fluent API" of the component to make a REST request
• and a call normally, seperating the methods out into seperate lines

He also mentions that there's still a bit of work to be done, including returning the Zend_Rest_Server array responses back into normal PHP arrays.