calling webservice using php

Question

I am new to PHP and wanted to write a snippet of code which would call a Webservice. I have the java equivalent code for it that works correctly.

HttpClient client=new HttpClient();
GetMethod method=new GetMethod(URL);
method.addRequestHeader("test1","test1");
String statusCode=client.executeMethod();
if (statusCode != HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
       System.err.println("Method failed: " + method.getStatusLine());
}
// Read the response body.
byte[] responseBody = method.getResponseBody();
// Deal with the response.
// Use caution: ensure correct character encoding and is not binary data
System.out.println(new String(responseBody));

Answer 1

Your should use some webservice dedicated methods, it would be easier. For example if your webservice is a SOAP one : http://php.net/manual/fr/book.soap.php , or an XML-RPC : http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.xmlrpc.php

Answer 2

Look at httprequest-send in php, that should get you started in terms of building the right request.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.httprequest-send.php

Answer 3

There are a bunch of different ways to do it.

If you're just trying to send a simple GET request, file_get_contents will work just fine. (Note: you can also do POST requests with file_get_contents in conjunction with stream_context_create , but there are other ways I find nicer)

Example:

$response = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com/webservice?foo=bar&baz=1");

Another method is to use cURL . This may not be available on all systems (but should be on most). Here's an example of a POST request using curl:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.example.com/webservice');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query(array('foo'=>'bar','baz'=>1)));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$result = curl_exec($ch);

Alternatively, another way is to use the PEAR package HTTP_Request2 . This will work on all systems and can be a nice way to do it. For more information and examples, see the manual page .