Introduction

Making background queries to external web services is becoming an ever-increasing part of any PHP web practice. The ability to provide appropriate, timely, and plentiful data means more business for your customers and the websites you develop. We start with a couple of recipes aimed at data conversion between eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and native PHP. Next, we show you how to implement a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) client and server. After that, we turn our attention to SOAP clients and servers.