Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications

Chapter 6. Testing Service-Oriented APIs

Matthew Weier O'Phinney

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Recurring issues in Web service testing

• Testing an existing service that requires credentials

• Working around API limits

• Testing service protocols offline

• Testing Web service APIs without requiring network connectivity

One of Zend Framework's key strengths and differentiators in the crowded PHP framework arena is its offering of Web service consumer components. As of version 1.9, these include offerings for Adobe's AMF protocol, Akismet, Amazon (including EC2 and S3 support), Audioscrobbler from Last.fm, Delicious, Flickr, Google's GData services, Nirvanix, ReCAPTCHA, SimPy, SlideShare, StrikeIron, Technorati, Twitter, and Yahoo!—and more are planned or under development.

These services offer a myriad of functionalities:

• Add Spam filtering or CAPTCHA support to your forms (Zend_Service_Akismet, Zend_Service_ReCaptcha).

• Provide a listing of Amazon products matching particular criteria, or display individual Amazon products on your site (Zend_Service_Amazon).

• Scale your application using cloud services: offload file storage, utilize cloud databases, interact with queue services, or manage cloud server instances (Zend_Service_Nirvanix, Zend_Service_Amazon_S3, Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs, Zend_Service_Amazon_Ec2).

• Manage or query social bookmarking services, search for music recommendations, create photo galleries from image services, embed your business presentations, or update social media statuses (Zend_Service_Delicious, ...