Pick Your Protocol: Creating Web Services with Zend Framework

As the demand for data portability increases, so too does the incentive for service-oriented web sites to offer web services that expose their data for public consumption by other systems. With the advent of wide adoption, data access as a service is also becoming an increasingly popular commodity. Under these circumstances, it is crucial that developers be prepared to implement web services, and what better way to do so than with a open-source framework that has both corporate backing and a contributing community?

Zend Framework offers readily available components to accelerate the development of web services for the enterprise, both for implementation of web services themselves as well as supporting components such as underlying data models and authentication services. Through development by a dedicated team at Zend and the community built around the project, new components are still being added to increase the number of web service protocols and output formats supported by the framework and available to its users.

Topics to be covered:
* Definition of web services and their intended applications including pulling and pushing data
* How MVC and component modularization accelerates web service implementation
* Common web service protocols including REST, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, and SOAP and how to choose the best one for the job
* Zend_Rest_Server
* Zend_XmlRpc_Server
* Zend_Soap_Server and Zend_Soap_Wsdl
* Zend_Json_Server
* Zend_Auth for HTTP authentication
* Zend_Json for JSON output