In a new post on the IBM developerWorks page, Nathan Good takes a look at some of the features of the up and coming versions of the PHP language including things like namespaces, changes in the XML handling and a few things taken out.

PHP's next edition, V6, includes new features and syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.

New features he mentions include namespace support, improvements to the native Unicode support as well as a few of the things that will be permanently retired like the php.ini settings for magic_quotes and register_globals.

In a new article from PHPBuilder.com.au today, they talk about the "powerhouse of web services", SOAP, and how to get started working with it in PHP.

You've tried your hand at building mashups, experimented with a few RESTful Web services, maybe even started your own. Sure, you've got data sharing working. But how do you make your Web applications really talk to each other? In this tutorial, I'll show you how to take your Web applications to the next level with SOAP.

They opt to go with the NuSOAP method to consume another service and create your own simple one. They include a few code examples for either side and a (very) brief look at doing some debugging with what NuSOAP has to offer. One thing to note - if you have PHP5's SOAP extension compiled in and working, NuSOAP will throw an error about redeclaring a class name. This is because of a conflict between the naming of the SOAP extension's methods and NuSOAP.

Marco Tabini has posted his list of what he considers five features of PHP5 that you "can't afford to ignore" when doing your development work:

Despite the fact that you may not have a choice in the matter, upgrading comes with a number of bonus new features that can help you write better code and gain access to new functionality that required a fair amount of hacking in previous version. Here's a quick list of 5 personal favourites.

The feature to make his list are SimpleXML, JSON/SOAP, PDO, the Standard PHP Library and SQLite. Each has their own bonus feature(s) included too for a little extra incentive to check them out.

Eirik Hoem has posted a tip for all of the PHP SOAP developers out there - a method for setting the xsi:type correctly for objects sent in the message.

I spent quite some time looking for info on how to specify the xsi:type for the objects, and I finally came across SoapVar. I created a base class which the SOAP classes extended. A method called pack is responsible for setting xsi:type.

In his example, he creates a BaseClass to work from and builds a createCustomer class on top of it, defining a setCustomer function inside. When the new Person is created, a new Customer is too complete with the correctly formatted type on the object.

Eirik Hoem has posted an update on a previous problem he was having when working with SOAP in PHP and its handling of arrays.

The scenario was that when an array with only one object was returned over SOAP the array was discarded and pointed straight to the single object.

Come to find out, this behavior wasn't a bug, it was a feature - the fix is to add another parameter to the initialization of the SoapClient to add the SOAP_SINGLE_ELEMENT_ARRAYS feature.

Korynn Bohn has posted a new tutorial/article on the Zend Developer Zone website that talks about (and advocates for) web services.

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.

Andrew Johnstone has a new post today with a look at a project he'd worked on - an implementation of a web service with the Zend Framework functionality.

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.

The PHP Web Services blog has a helpful hint on getting a custom SOAP request all ready to go:

How do you get this [custom] XML to be output by the SoapClient?

Using the SoapVar method and a few newly created objects, making a custom structure is simple. It's just a matter of encoding the object and setting it with the base() method in the PHP SOAP extension. Check out the blog post for an example of both the custom XML and the code to produce it.

On the PHP Web Services blog today, Sami asks "what's missing from PHP's SOAP extension" that needs to be added or corrected.

PHP SOAP extension is good to get started, to play around with. However, it falls much short in meeting the enterprise demands in the SOA era.

He talks about things missing (like binary file features and lots of security features). He also notes something that most PHP developers love about the extension - the WSDL parsing that makes it so easy to simply call a remote service without having to go through the pain of hacking through it yourself.

As the PHP Web Services blog points out today, there's some training offered for developers looking to get into working with web services (using SOAP and WS-Security specifically).

Here's the description of the course

This training helps you create secure Web services and clients using SOAP, and WS-Security, which are inter-operable with Java and .NET systems. It also teaches you how to work with WSDL and binary attachments when using Web services in PHP.

The class lasts for three hours and requires that you have some level of experience with web services (enough to know XML and the concepts behind passing it as messages back and forth). The cost for the event is $199 USD and the next session for it is coming up on January 16th starting at 9am (PST). You can get additional details on it from the detail page on the wso2.com website.