April 2013
Intermediate to advanced
115 pages
2h 42m
English
Content preview from PHP Web ServicesBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 7. RPC and SOAP Services
In this chapter we’ll be looking at two closely-related types of services: Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services, and SOAP. These two feel fairly similar, as they both involve calling functions and passing parameters, but their implementations are in stark contrast as the RPC is a very loose way of describing a service, whereas SOAP is very tightly specified.
RPC
RPC services quite literally call procedures (i.e., functions) remotely. These types of API will typically have a single endpoint, so all requests are made to the same URL. Each request will include the name of the function to call, and may include some parameters to pass to it. Working with RPC services should feel familiar to us as developers because we know how to call functions—we simply do so over HTTP.
To start out, consider Example 6-2 when a call was made to Flickr. The URL we made for that example was:
http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&tags= kitten&format=xmlrpc
Within the URL, the name of the function can be seen in the “method” parameter (flickr.photos.search), the particular tags to search for are found in tags=, and the format parameter asks for the response in XML-RPC format.
There is a distinct difference between using an RPC-style service, with function names and parameters included in the data supplied, and having a service that is true XML-RPC, which is a very defined format. The option you choose depends entirely on the situation you and your application ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.