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In this age, when it can sometimes seem like every system is connected to every other
system, dealing with data has become a major ingredient in building the Web. Whether
you will be delivering services or consuming them, web service is a key part of all
modern, public-facing applications, and this book is here to help you navigate your way
along the road ahead. We will cover the different styles of service—from RPC, to SOAP,
to REST—and you will see how to devise great solutions using these existing approaches,
as well as examples of APIs in the wild. Whether you’re sharing data between two internal
systems, using a service backend for a mobile application, or just plain building an API
so that users can access their data, this book has you covered, from the technical sections
on HTTP, JSON, and XML to the “big picture” areas such as creating a robust service.
Why did we pick PHP for this book? Well, PHP has always taken on the mission to
“solve the web problem.” Web services are very much part of that “problem” and PHP
is ideally equipped to make your life easy, both when consuming external services and
when creating your own. As a language, it runs on many platforms and is the technology
behind more than half of the Web, so you can be sure that it will be widely available,
wherever you are. This book does not adopt any particular frameworks; instead, it aims
to give you the tools you will need to understand the topic as a whole and apply that
knowledge to whichever frameworks, libraries, or other wrappers you choose to use.
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