How to easily consume a web service from PHP

Question

Is there available any tool for PHP which can be used to generate code for consuming a web service based on its WSDL? Something comparable to clicking "Add Web Reference" in Visual Studio or the Eclipse plugin which does the same thing for Java.

Answer 1

In PHP 5 you can use SoapClient on the WSDL to call the web service functions. For example:

$client = new SoapClient("some.wsdl"); 

and $client is now an object which has class methods as defined in some.wsdl. So if there was a method called getTime in the WSDL then you would just call:

$result = $client->getTime(); 

And the result of that would (obviously) be in the $result variable. You can use the __getFunctions method to return a list of all the available methods.