In this tutorial, I'll show you how to take your Web applications to the next level with SOAP, the "powerhouse of Web services", building high-end Web services with pure PHP.
SOAP 101
SOAP is a protocol for applications and servers to communicate with each other. Its primary use in PHP is exposing Web services and building Web service clients. As a protocol, it can exchange messages over HTTP/HTTPS, which helps it get around firewalls that would block other protocols (eg, Remote Procedure Call). As an application layer protocol, SOAP is also entirely platform independent — your PHP Web application can talk to a Java database server, for example, as long as they both speak SOAP.
SOAP messages are simply XML with some custom namespaces, so they're fully machine-readable. Libraries are available for every major language, and working with SOAP Web services is quick, easy and fast.
