Zend Framework 101: Zend_Soap

Consuming the Web Service

Now that we've created our web service (at the location http://example.com/webservice.php), we can create a client script to consume the web service.

For this, we are going to use Zend_Soap_Client class. You could use PHP's built-in SoapClient class (or even use a programming language other than PHP), but since this is a series on the Zend Framework we'll use the Zend_Soap_Client class.

Consuming the service is simply a matter of instantiating Zend_Soap_Client with the URL of the WSDL file (http://example.com/webservice.php?wsdl) as the only argument, then calling the functions from the PHP class we created earlier as if they were local function calls.

Listing 5 shows how we make use of the web service calls. The PHP script can live on a completely different web server and URL to your server. After all, that is the point of web services!

<?php
    require_once('Zend/Soap/Client.php');
 
    $url = 'http://exsmple.com/webservice.php?wsdl';
 
    $client = new Zend_Soap_Client($url);
 
    echo sprintf('Server Timestamp: %s', $client->getDate());
    echo "<br />\n";
    echo $client->getAgeString('Quentin', 28);
?>

In this code you will see we call $client->getDate() and $client->getAgeString(). When these functions are called, internally Zend_Soap_Client is communicating with the SOAP server specified in $url.

While this is a somewhat simplified implementation, it works, and it should demonstrate how to implement both the server and client aspects of a SOAP web service!

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