Using SOAP in PHP
Because web services quickly became a widely used technology, every popular programming language sought to develop and improve its support for creating and exploiting web services. For example, PHP has a few extensions (PEARs and libraries) that add web services support. Starting with PHP5, such support ships with the language in a library called NuSOAP.
Because the NuSOAP library has a great usability/performance rate, you'll see how to use it in this article to develop a complete web service. The NuSOAP library is a collection of PHP classes that supports sending and receiving SOAP messages using the HTTP protocol. The NuSOAP library, also known as SOAPx4, is a NuSphere product (you can download the NuSOAP library from http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/). To make your PHP source files aware of NuSOAP classes, include the following code snippet:
require_once('./nusoap-php5-0.9/lib/nusoap.php');