Access to a Web Service from your PHP page

If you want to access Axis2 based Web Service such as OGCE local services(Job Submission service, and File Agent service) from your PHP page, there are several ways to do it. NuSOAP and Pear SOAP provide APIs into WebService. Also IMHO PHP has PHP's built-in SOAP libraries.

Since I'm a complete beginner of PHP, I'm not that familliar with the advanced design issues regarding the PHP based application. However, WSO2's WSF/PHP was a good starting point to me. Especially, it could provide us a proof of concept of our service which interacts with PHP pages through the standard WSDL interface.

You can use WSF/PHP both to build a Web Service and to build a client of a Web Service. In my case, I wanted to create a PHP client accessing a Web Service running in the Axis2 container. First, WSF/PHP provides quite simple interface to the PHP clients. For the examples, please refer to the next blog message. Basically, I needed to provide EPR of the service and XML string which are supposed to be in the SOAP body. Besides the ease-to-use feature, I was happy with that WSF/PHP allows the users to control over the SOAP message when it is needed(such as version of SOAP).

I've tried WSF/PHP with PHP5.1.1 on Linux box. Here is the step-by-step guide to the installation.

Step 1.Apache HTTP server install (if you don't have one already)
download PHP5.1.1 and install
download WSO2 WSF/PHP source from the project web site

Step 2. go to the directory of WSF/PHP source code
./configure
make
make install

Step 3. in php.ini (it will be in /usr/local/lib/php.ini if you didn't change the location)
add following lines:

extension=wsf.so
extension=xsl.so
extension_dir="/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-***".
include_path = "/home/username/php/wso2-wsf-php-src-1.2.1/script"

Step 4. copy sample code included in the code distribution to the Web server's document root. Test http://localhost/samples/