I recently found myself having to get some data from a SOAP service onto a Symfony 1.4 site.  The data consisted of a simple title, location and posting date of the two most recent records from the service.

When accessing a SOAP service – especially when your API access is metered – it’s often a good idea to set up a local cache of the data.  That way you’re not burning your page load times with server-side HTTP requests, using up precious request allotments or concurrent connection limits.  Which means you have to mirror or abstract the remote inside of your app.
Initially my design consisted of creating a local Doctrine 1.2 data model, a handful of application configuration options and then adding some methods to the model and table classes to fetch locally and update the database with forced or timed expiries.  Read more...