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copied!<p>I have no real experience with PHP, but I've done plenty of Python back-end web services consumed by front-end clients in a variety of languages and environment. SOAP is the only technology, out of those I've tried, that has mostly left a sour taste in my mouth -- too much "ceremony"/overhead. (Back in the far past I also tried Corba and, as soon as I was trying to interoperate among independed implementations for different languages, the feeling wasn't all that different;-).</p> <p>XML-RPC, JSON, and protocol buffers, all proved quite usable for me.</p> <p>Protocol buffers is what we normally use within Google, and I'm not sure what you find so under-documented about them -- please ask specific questions and I'll see what I can do to make our documentation better, officially or unofficially! Their main advantage is that they're so "tight" on the wire -- minimal overhead with maximum flexibility. JSON is great, too -- and not just for ease of use in Javascript clients, either: sometimes I've used it as the default format for communication among different languages, too, when no JS was involved at all!</p> <p>Once you have your web app set up to emit (say) a protocol buffer, it's not hard <em>at all</em> to make it able to emit XML or JSON on request - one ?outputformat=JSON extra parameter in the GET request is all it takes, and picking the right output serializer is trivially easy (in Python, but, I'm sure, in PHP as well).</p> <p>"Getting strongly typed objects" on your C# end is, in my view, a job you can best do in a C# layer on your end. No direct experience with that, but, for example, I <em>have</em> wrapped reception of protocol buffers in C++ into factory classes that spewed out perfectly formed and statically typed objects (or raised exceptions when the incoming data was not semantically correct); I know it wouldn't be any harder for JSON or XML, and I very much doubt it would be any harder for Java, C#, Python if you cared, or any other language that's any use at all in the real world!-)</p>

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