Calling another Service Component

The ConvertedStockQuote example also calls the proxies for the two components to which it refers.

The call to the StockQuote service is a call to a local service; the call to the ExchangeRate service is a call to a remote service. Note that the way the call is made looks the same regardless of whether the call is to a local service or a remote one.

The proxies which have been injected ensure that the way calls to components look and behave are the same way regardless of whether they are to a local or remote service, so that components are not sensitive to whether a call is to a local or a remote service. For example, the proxy for a local service takes copies of the arguments and passes only those copies, to ensure that calls are made to be pass-by-value, as they would be for a remote call. Also, the proxy for a remote service takes the arguments from a positional parameter list and ensures they are packaged properly in a SOAP request and converted back to a positional parameter list at the far end.

In the example above, the $ticker and $currency are clearly PHP scalar types. Components can pass the PHP scalar types string, integer, float and boolean, but data structures on service calls are always passed as Service Data Objects (SDOs). A later section describes how a component can create an SDO to pass on a local or Web service call, or how a component can create an SDO to return. The PHP SDO project documentation describes how to work with the SDO APIs (see the SDO pages).