cooking up the offense like he's cooking ravioli

Yahoo! added a PHP section to their impressive developer network. The PHP Developer Center has some good content already, focusing heavily on web services and XML.

There aren’t too many things that are new for me, but the web service caching looks pretty interesting. I also really like that Yahoo! makes many of their web service responses available in XML, JSON, and Serialized PHP.

XML is the obvious response format for a web service. Any language can easily parse XML. JSON is also becoming a pretty good choice for a response format. As ajax gains popularity, javascript is going to start making more and more web service requests. The serialized PHP response format threw me for a loop when I first saw it. I had never before thought of using serialized content in a web service. It makes so much sense and it is great that Yahoo! is supporting it. Basically, by serializing the data for PHP, Yahoo! is putting the information in the closest format possible for your PHP script to use with minimal work. Not that SimpleXML is hard to use, but unserialize() is even easier (and it’s available in PHP4 and PHP3, for that matter) and faster.