One interesting topic on web development is webservice development. There are several techniques to implement a webservice out there, and today I’ll talk about one technique that I worked in the recent past that I really like: SOAP. As per wikipedia:

SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks. It relies on Extensible Markup Language (XML) as its message format and usually relies on other Application Layer protocols, most notably Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and HTTP for message negotiation and transmission. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the web services protocol stack providing a basic messaging framework upon which abstract layers can be built.

The plan for this tutorial is to build a complete set of webservice methods to interact with the citypicker, built in a previous post. For this, I’ll use a great symfony plugin called ckWebService. This plugin enables the developer to expose your actions as a SOAP webservices. Another great functionality is the built-in WSDL generator, that parses module’s doc comment in order to identify which actions should be exposed and it’s input/output parameters.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today morning I was reading the Symfony blog, more specifically A week of symfony #96 and then I came across a tutorial talking about conditional validators.This is very usefull, I find myself using this technique very often, so I decided to write about another techinique I use sometimes to implement a conditional validation, but for a different scenario. Imagine the following: you have a contact form where the users specify how they want to be contacted, email or phone, throught a select box. Then you have two input boxes where the users can enter both email and phone. If the user opts to be contacted via email, email field becomes mandatory and phone number optional, and the opposite happens if the user opts to be contacted via phone. So, how to implement such a form in symfony?

Read the rest of this entry »