Supermondays: Recap
Last night I travelled to the northeast of England to speak to a thriving technical community up there called Supermondays. They contacted me some time ago asking if I could get there to speak one Monday, and last night was the night! It was a very civilised gathering, with sandwiches and cups of tea, and using a lecture theatre at the university for space. As a speaker the best thing about this is that its a space designed for addressing people in, unlike most user groups (and indeed conferences!) where two steps away from the lectern sees you standing in the dark, falling off the stage, or getting projected on to. Last night was a different story with lots of space to wander, slides projected well above me on the wall so everyone could see clearly, and relatively good acoustics despite no amplification.
My talk was entitled “PHP and Web Services: Perfect Partners” – the slides are on slideshare if you want to take a look. There was also a talk about android development by Alex Reid, including a live coding demo which went surprisingly well! Judging by the various events that were plugged and discussed on the night, at the main event and in the pub afterwards, this is a diverse and vibrant technical community – so if you are in the northeast, get along to Supermondays!
It was a great talk – thanks for coming up to present to us.
You mentioned how hard it can be to debug SOAP calls, especially when using different platforms at each end. One tool I have found immensely useful is soapUI, which can be used for free (there is a professional version too) and is obtained here: http://www.soapui.org/
I find that getting the SOAP interface working in that tool first will often highlight any potential problems with the API, and it is then much easier to move the service to a PHP consumer knowing how the service works, leaving just the implementation to be debugged.
I’m mentioning it because soapUI does not seem to be particularly well-known, but is a hidden gem.
— Jason
Just to add – there is a soapUI eclipse plugin, but it can also be used standalone for smaller projects.