In addition to Johannes‘ blog entry, my experience with PHP5 is also a positive one: we are using it since PHP5.0beta3 in production for an international project at Vaillant where external systems (VB.NET, Java) are accessing the systems‘ functions with a SOAP interface.
I chose PHP5 and the corresponding ext/soap for this because the SOAP extension currently is the best one available for PHP and the one with the most promising future. The web application itself runs with PHP4 (we’ll think about switching to PHP5.1 and up next year when PHP5 is as fast as PHP4) as mod_php on an Apache with mod_php5 on a second Apache which is proxied to the first Apache so that on port 80 we have PHP4 _and_ PHP5 (CGI was no option here) – both PHPs are pointing to the same document root (I’m glad that our e-business framework Chairman runs without changes on PHP5 :-), and the PHP5 one is only accessed via the SOAP service.
The system is very stable, we only had some problems with .NET accessing the WSDL service (mainly because .NET expects arrays of arrays in another way), but successfully shipped around this problem.
Note to Dimitri: please allow to setup more than 1 class for building the SOAP server, thanks.
There are still some problems with php5 and valid soap – for example with array entries that are put in by reference.
It would be very interesting to know how you „successfully shipped around“ the problem.
As Johann mentions above there are problems with ext/soap not supporting xml elements sent by reference which .NET so much like to do.
Hi Danne,
Our collegue Manfred posted an article about SOAP with PHP and .net: http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/9-PHP-soap-server-and-dotNet-c-client-part-1-Nested-Arrays.html More on this will follow step by step just keep reading :-)
Running PHP on the Windows 95 platform is not supported anymore due to it not supporting functionality which PHP uses. As Microsoft has officially stopped supporting it over a year ago the PHP development community decided that this is a wise decision