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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: PEAR:SOAP and kSoap
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combining languages is allways lots of fun. In the past this was solved with proprietary middleware solutions like MQSeries or with brutal killer protocols like Corba. Nowadays, you can use more or less simple protocols like SOAP.
I am saying more or less, because even a human readable and understandable protocol like SOAP gets complicated when you dont have too much documentation for a given abstraction library. I want to communicate from a wireless mobile phone to a PHP powered web server. So i am using kSoap on the phone (have not tested wireless messaging API yet) and PEAR:SOAP on the server. PEAR:SOAP is one of the most undocumented APIs i have ever seen and again, i am wondering how PHP wants to enter the enterprise level w/o documenting important libs.
Within java you would easily say: Forget this lib/project, i will take a better documented one. With php you are stuck. As far as i know, there is an experimental C-Plugin to PHP and a no longer maintained NuSoap PHP lib. Not the best choices as it seems. At the end, you start reading through the PHP scripts in order to see whats going on. The basic idea of abstraction from the details is long forgotten then ;-)
At the moment, my simple function calls work ok, but i am allready scared regarding upcoming requests like returning structs...All you have is some sample scripts. Not one line of Class definition or text based documentation. This is why i am still prefering java, besides of all the superior OO features.