A look at the POG SOAP API

The POG SOAP API, available as from POG 2.0, provides a simple way to build applications ‘on top’ of PHP database objects generated by POG. And since database objects are useful whenever you’re dealing with a database, then by extrapolation, the POG SOAP API should also be very useful.

To illustrate how the POG SOAP API can be used by another web application, we recently built and launched another web service: Web Form Factory (WFF). WFF is a free web service which binds any html form to a database by generating the appropriate backend code.

When a user submits an HTML form to WFF, this is what happens behind the scenes:

1. WFF analyzes and detects all the inputs.
2. WFF then follows some internal rules which map the inputs to specific database column types. For example text fields are mapped to VARCHAR ( 255 ) and text areas are mapped to TEXT.
3. After the lists of input names and attribute types are internally built, WFF uses POG’s SOAP API to generate the appropriate objects.
4. WFF receives the POG objects, POG setup script and POG configuration file and adds the form + backend code to the mix.
5. WFF finally zips and returns everything to the end user.

A short video example of how WFF works can be downloaded here

Since WFF is also open source, feel free to take a look at the code. The part that will most probably interest the most users is where WFF queries POG’s SOAP functions:

$client = new soapclient($GLOBALS[‘configuration’][‘soap_pog’], true);
$params = array(
‘objectName’ => $form -> name,
‘attributeList’ => $form -> attributeList,
‘typeList’ => $form -> typeList,
‘language’ => strtolower($language),
‘wrapper’ => $wrapper,
‘pdoDriver’ => $pdoDriver
);
$package = unserialize($client->call(‘GeneratePackage’, $params));

We hope that this example will inspire others to use POG’s SOAP API to build other powerful web applications.

Feel Free to send you feedback, questions or comments to the WFF Google Group