Web Services Training with PHP

Question

I would like to get some good training on how to publish and consume web services using PHP. My employer is allowing me a budget to do this for next year. I was wondering if anyone new of some good web service training using PHP as the tool to do so.

Edit: Just to clarify a little. I have been using PHP for about 4 years now and am fairly confident with it. I would like training on anything related to web services with PHP. I know how to make curl requests and parse the data. I even know how, in a general way, to publish data I have via XML and JSON. What I would like I guess it training on the standards currently being used.

Answer 1

Very few shops teach PHP and with so few, I question the quality of the classes/teacher. I recommend you stick with books and PHP.net's manual, the user comments on the manual are heavily monitored & removed, so they are very high quality, better than many books in fact because they offer outstanding real world examples.

Here's a good place to get your feet wet: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2003/10/30/amazon_rest.html

Answer 2

I don't really understand your question very well (see my comment) but if you want to learn how to make use of Yahoo! and Google APIs and the like in your PHP applications I can recommend the Zend Framework which has Classes for many popular services.

Zend Framwork in Action (Allen et al., in press)

Zend Framework groups these and many more components into a set of classes prefixed with Zend_Service. There is Zend_Service_Amazon, Zend_Service_Delicious, Zend_Service_Simpy, Zend_Service_SlideShare and Zend_Service_Yahoo to name but a few within this family. Google has a number of online applications that allow for API access which are supported by the Zend_Gdata component. The Zend_Gdata component provides access to Google’s Blogger, Calendar, Base, YouTube, and CodeSearch applications. In order to provide consistency, the Zend_Gdata component provides the data using Zend_Feed, so if you can process an RSS feed, then you can process Google Calendar data too.

If you want to get training and can have it paid you might want to look at the Zend Framework certification.