Event date:

We are pleased to announce our fifth monthly PHP North-East community meeting, which thanks to the generosity of PNE (Note the change in venue!) is taking place in @PostOfficeNE1, 5 Pink Lane a stones throw away from last months venue of The Town Wall, where we will be having a few post-talk drinks. The meeting is free and open to all, so feel free to come along and see what the group is all about.

For more information about PHP North-East, feel free to join our Google Group and be sure to follow our Twitter account for the latest news; your feedback, ideas for talks and offers of assistance are most welcome. As we are trying out a new venue this month, we haven’t been able to arrange the usual free chips, though we will try to see if we can arrange something (no promises!).

This month features a talk from Martin Dunn from the website lab:

Web Services with PHP and SOAP

“Web services” has become a bit of a buzzword over the past few recent years but there’s still some confusion as to what they actually are and how they fit into the web technologies stack. Put simply, a web services is a system that allows two devices to communicate with each other over a network regardless of what technologies or language those devices may be using.

My talk will include a description of what a web service actual is and the history of web services, the technologies they use and a demonstration of how you can set up and consume your own web service using PHP. The topics covered will include:

  • An explanation and history of web services and the technologies used to power them
  • A basic description of what the SOAP protocol is
  • What WSDL and UDDI are and why they’re so clever
  • A demonstration of setting up your own web service server and client using PHP and nuSOAP
  • Brief explanation of web service security

The talk is designed to be a gentle introduction to those who are interested in learning more about web services and how to implement them using PHP, with real world examples. The idea is to provide some grounding information and to inspire further reading.