Hi all

We are currently nearing completion of a project that needs to handle many 1000s of SOAP requests from around the world and have written the SOAP service using NuSOAP instead of the native PHP Soap extensions due to hearing PHP's SOAP extensions weren't all that great...

We have a Linode 720 server set up using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Nginx and Xcache but wondering if anyone on here has any enterprise level SOAP experience that they could share with us or some basic pros and cons for going with nusoap or php flavours etc?

Many thanks in advance for ANY thoughts on ANY of the above

Andy

Have you considered using JSON? I had a popular application receiving many SOAP requests and after switching to JSON I saved a lot of resources.

I'd recommend doing some profiling to see if xcache or APC does better... you may be surprised. It would also show you what will happen under load, like unexpectly running out of memory and ending up in swapdeath.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Are you talking about using the JSON extension within PHP? I had seen this but not gone into any depth with it. Will take a fresh look now...

As for Xcache - I have it installed due to fact it seemed to work better in other scenarios / web projects of ine in the past compared to APC but I agree some profiling needs to be done for this specific new project.

Any tips on where there are any SOAP gurus for hire anywhere if we get stuck?

There seems to be one that is pretty much built in to PHP and works fast. You can either build your own JSON server that does JSON-RPC or find one you like... if you do, let me know as some that I used I wasn't 100% happy with.

It seems to be many many times faster than the overhead of making complicated (usually overcomplicated) XML envelopes with all the SOAP info in. Although I do understand it can reduce friction between developers etc in some situations.

I'd help you but I'm booked up for the next few months, a good thing!.

"There seems to be one that is pretty much built in to PHP"

Which one are you taking about here?

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/book.json.php

Probably not built-in but seems to be in most PHP installs.

After looking at this I can't seem to work out any way that you could hide access details for this system like SOAP as the data being sent is always accessible via the client side .js

Via SOAP I can do this:

Client sends soap request with Access id & token to my Soap Server

If user checks out
return data
else
user not allowed
display error
end