Soap ?

Hello sir,

I've read your article and had a quick look at the source code, I'm sorry I couldn't inspect it more carefully.

I think your xml descripting method can be interesting for someone who doesnt want to learn about xml and xsds, and lacks an interesting feature which would be to convert this array to a xsd file, and also be able to parse a xsd file to generate your array format.

I think this because with the few years of coding in php in a business environment, I've been dealing many times with xml, but 100% for developping SOAP services.
If I wanted to use your class, for example to develop a soap server, in any case, I would have to create the array descripting the structure of the request's data I expect and then transcript it manually to a wsdl compliant format, xsd, which would be twice the pain ;)

This is an important facet of the use of xml format in php apps theses days.

That's also why I think your format description lacks a bit of interest because I still would have to learn another standard xml description language.

I hope you got my point.

XSD is just a format for describing XML documents but what most PHP developers know best is PHP because that is what they write every day.

Having to write a XSD definition just to parse a XML document is twice the pain that most PHP developers want to avoid when dealing with XML.

Other than that XSD is a format just validation purposes. It only supports data types that are specified in its specification. If you need to validate and extract data that needs to satisfy special validation rules, XSD cannot help you.

What this class offers you is a means to deal with common types with minimal pain writing almost no additional code, and for custom validation you just need to add just a few lines of custom PHP code.