SOAP box: accessing VIES from PHP-GTK
With OSInet having a large part of its business with suppliers and customers within the EU at large, I often find myself having to check the validity of the VAT information for third parties, and the EU VIES database comes in handy.
However,
although I had been discussing remote access
using XML-RPC or SOAP as early at 2004 with the database
administrators, the UI had remained web 1.0-only until quite
recently (apparently march 2007), when an
AXIS
SOAP service went online, just as I had suggested three years
ago. So I figured I really couldn't let the occasion pass, and did a
PHP-GTK client to VIES, which happens to be my first production
SOAP application in PHP-GTK, previous ones having always been
done in Pascal using Delphi or Kylix.
Let's see how this can be done... (code updated 2010-09-21)