ABOUT THE SPEAKER Adam Trachtenberg is manager of technical evangelism at eBay, where he preaches the gospel of eBay to developers and businessmen around the globe. He is also the author of two books: Upgrading to PHP 5 and PHP Cookbook, both published by O’Reilly Media. He is a frequent speaker at conferences on PHP, and has written articles for Adobe, c|Net, and the O’Reilly Network. SESSION DESCRIPTION This session teaches developers how to get up and running in the field of Web services. The talk begins with an overview of Web services, highlighting their purpose and benefits. Along the way, developers will learn the strengths and weaknesses of SOAP, XML-RPC, and REST, the three major Web services protocols. After laying a theoretical foundation, the talk continues on to design considerations in real-life Web services. Using the eBay API as a case study, you'll see the factors a company needs to consider when deploying a Web service interface and how that influences their offerings. Finally, developers will learn how to implement Web services clients using PHP to access the eBay platform.