In a recent post to CodeForest Luka Peharda shows you how to create a JSON-RPC frontend for your application based on the Zend Framework.

XML-RPC rules, but the amount of data it generates is its big disadvantage. This is where JSON-RPC steps in. Data it generates is significally smaller, but this isn't suprising as JSON is known as fat free XML.This articles is based on my earlier Android XML-RPC article. Its PHP code and Zend Framework setup will be used so you should go through it if you haven't earlier (at least as far as XMLRPC Android client chapter).

You need to have some of the base code from the previous article in place to follow along, but if you're experienced with Zend Framework, keeping up won't be a problem. He uses this JSON-RPC client that was made for use with a ZF application and creates a basic jsonAction to handle the request. He then uses this Android JSON-RPC library to connect from the Android application and fetch some basic data.

On the Ibuildings techPortal there's a new post with the latest episode in their DPCRadio series (as recorded at this past Dutch PHP Conference) - Melanie Rhianna Lewis' talk on web services and consumer devices.

A web service is an API provided by a site that allows a remote application to access data and use functionality without having to 'act like a web browser'. [...] The talk will describe how a web service targeted at consumer devices can be implemented. It will look at the different methods of calling remote functionality such as SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON and restful services. It will also consider the limitations of consumer devices, memory restrictions, communications bandwidth restrictions, and so on that have to be considered when designing a web service aimed at consumer devices. Finally it will have a brief look at how to make a service secure.

You can find the slides for the session here and you can either listen to the episode through the in-page player or buy downloading the mp3 directly.

In a new post to his blog Kevin Schroeder shows how to use the Zend_Server component of the Zend Framework to make a script that automatically makes the server you need based off of the request type.

I've been doing some work with Adobe on some articles and one of them was on working with mobile clients with Flash. Well, me being the masochist I did more. What I did was write an example that worked as a full website, an Ajax website, a Flash service and an XML-RPC service. [...] In a plugin, which I will show you in a bit, I attached an instance of Zend_Server_Interface. Then in the controller I simple told it to do its thing, with the exception of handing the Service Mapping Description for JSON-RPC ($smd). That's it.

Because of how the XML-RPC, JSON and AMF servers are handled, they extend the main Zend_Server_Interface, making it easy to create them on the fly. He includes the code for both the sample controller and the plugin mentioned above. It checks for Ajax, AMF, XML and JSON request types and sets the service handler correctly. If there's not one, it falls back on the mapping.

In a new post to the Zend Developer Zone today the NP-Gravatar libraries are introduced as a way to hook your application into the Gravatar web service.

Gravatar is a famous web-service for providing globally-unique avatars. Gravatar, like many other web services, has its own APIs, which are based on simple HTTP GET requests. [...] By studying and analyzing those APIs, I come up with an idea to create a Zend Framework implementation of all those Gravatar services. That resulted in NP-Gravatar package, which will be presented in this post.

The project gives you two service classes and one view helper to make the integration with the frontend simpler. He explains each library and gives a code sample of them in action - grabbing profile information, an interface to the XML-RPC service they offer and the view helper to call a simple "gravatar()" method inside of an IMG tag.

Sudheer Satyanarayana has this new post on his blog today talking about a simple way (via a PEAR package) to make an XML-RPC connection to ping technorati about updates to your blog.

In a previous blog post we discussed how to consume the Technorati ping web service using XML-RPC. The PEAR package XML_RPC2 provides convenient client and server objects. You can call the remote methods as if they were the methods of the client object. In this post, let us accomplish the same using a PEAR package XML_RPC2. We will write a client script to update Technorati when there is new post in your blog site.

You'll need to grab the XML_RPC2 PEAR package to make this all work, but once that's installed, you're a quick few lines of code away from a client to update Technorati with the ping information for your site.

NETTUTS.com has posted a list of nine libraries you can use to quickly and easily add functionality to your web application.

A lot of functionality is shared among applications - like sending emails or preventing spam. In the spirit of reusing the wheel instead of reinventing it, here are nine free web libraries that you can use in your next program which will dramatically increase your efficiency.

Here's their list:

• ReCAPTCHA
• Akismet
• Services_JSON
• Smarty
• pChart
• SimplePie
• XML-RPC PHP Library
• Amazon S3
• PHPMailer

Screenshots (and code examples) are provided for several of the items as well as links to their website and documentation pages.

Melvin Rivera has come up with a quick script that allows you approve comments outside of your WordPress installation:

The job of approving comments sometimes falls on a person who does/should not have access to the WordPress admin. By design WordPress only allows a user with admin privileges to do this job. I wrote an an External Web Interface for approving pending WordPress comments via XMLRPC.

You can download the source from the Google Code site for the project and check out a screencast in his blog post.

In his "newbie findings" posted to his blog today, David Goodwin recounts his efforts to get SOAP an XML-RPC up and working with his PHP5 project and the wealth of documentation he found.

I'm no great expert on the inner workings of these protocols....there are probably secret manuals on SOAP/XmlRpc etc I/we failed to read somewhere. This is just a documentation of what I/we as "newbies" found ...

Resources in the list include things like the SCA SDO module from PECL, some examples of its usage, where it is used, what kind of transport layer the protocol allows and some of the functionality that the Zend Framework allows (including some sample code for a simple server and client).

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.

On O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website, there's a new tutorial by Deepak Vohra about the creation of web services with PHP, two different kinds - a SOAP service (and client) and an XML-RPC web service.

A web service consists of a server to serve requests to the web service and a client to invoke methods on the web service. The PHP class library provides the SOAP extension to develop SOAP servers and clients and the XML-RPC extension to create XML-RPC servers and clients. Before I delve further into developing web services with PHP, I shall briefly discuss web services.

HE starts with the SOAP service, using the functionality from the php_soap module to create a simple SOAP server (including the creation of a WSDL file, example included). The other side of things is included as well - a SOAP client that makes a request for items from a certain catalog and outputs to a page.

He uses the XML-RPC functionality to make the same type of service (with the same data) and includes the request and response XML for their request for the "hello" message the server responds with.