Tech Chorus

Title: Pro PHP XML and web services
Author: Robert Richards
Publisher: Apress
ISBN13: 978-1-59059-633-3

If you are a PHP programmer and looking to expand your knowledge in XML and web services areas, the book is a good resource. The book assumes no prior knowledge about XML and web services. It assumes you are capable of writing PHP programs independently.

Download the table of contents PDF document from the publisher.

In a previpus blog post we discussed how to consume the Technorati ping web service using XML-RPC. The PEAR package XML_RPC2 provides convenient client and server objects. You can call the remote methods as if they were the methods of the client object.

In this post, let us accomplish the same using a PEAR package XML_RPC2. We will write a client script to update Technorati when there is new post in your blog site.

If you are familiar with blogosphere you know what is Technorati.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. You can submit your blog to Technorati and ping their servers when your blog site is updated. when you ping Technorati their web crawlers read the updated information on your site.

Technorati offers an XML-RPC ping web service to allow blogs to notify content changes.

In this article we discuss how to write a PHP script to programatically ping Technorati when there is new content in your site.

Let us get familiar with some terminology.

RPC From the Wikipedia:
"Remote procedure call (RPC) is an Inter-process communication technology that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network) without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction."

Good definition. But what exactly does it mean?

In this article I will explain how to write an XML-RPC server and client in PHP.

To be able to understand the article, you have to have some idea about XML-RPC in general.

If you feel like gleaning more information about XML-RPC visit the following websites:

http://www.xmlrpc.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC

For an introduction to XML-RPC in PHP visit Introduction to XML-RPC In PHP