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.

One of the things that frustrates SOAP (and other web service) users is the creation of the WSDL files for their service. Learning a whole new "language" just to describe what they're offering seems silly, so the quest began for a method to automatically create this information based off of the service itself.

That's where this post on Katy's homepge comes in. It details updates Katy has made to a class offered by David Griffin called wsdl-writer-0.3.

There have been several attempts to write WSDL auto-generation code for PHP. They typically work by having the developer provide additional data about the types of each argument and return value to each web service defined, for example in comments or arrays.

All of the published solutions are rather limited. Perhaps the best attempt I found is David Giffin's wsdl-writer-0.3, but [it] has some major limitations as it stands. David unfortunately does not maintain wsdl-writer so I have decided to publish my modifications here.

She details the changes, noting updates to interoperability, new features (including native SOAP header support), and a few other bug fixes. A simple code example is also included, showing a sample web service class.