tim's journal

NuSOAP not functioning

Dietrich Ayala's NuSOAP is a PHP-based library for communicating using SOAP. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. It is a web services protocol - that is, it is a language for coordinating computing services over the web. For instance, I might have a web server which computes digits of π. To be SOAP compliant, I would have to have a document telling the user how to ask for digits of pi, e.g., send me how many digits you want, and how long you want me to work on it. All this is encased in XML (that's the "lingo"). Does that make sense? In the real world, it is used to get, for example, search results from Google or a listing of books from Amazon. It worked on my PC but not on my FreeBSD server. The problem turned out to be one I recognized a long time ago, my web host does not enable XML parsing with PHP by default, to do so, you need to add '@dl('xml.so');' before you call the library. So, there ya go.