How can I create a web service using PHP and MySQL?

You certainly get a lot of functionality out of a framework designed to build webservices, but in the essence a webservice is a webserver url generating data in a serialized form such as xml or, more pragmatically json. you don't need anyting fancy to achieve this, pure php is perfectly capable: <?php $data = []; die( json_encode($data) ); you can then add a routing library to have apache generate a response for pretty url like /controler/action/param1/param2if you need this functionality(an more), take a look to the microframework Sylex (http://silex.sensiolabs.org/ the next step is to read data from mysql, you will find many examples in the php PDO documentation for doing it, here is a minimalistic implemetation: <?php $dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=testdb'; $username = 'username'; $password = 'password'; $dbh = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password); function get_data($dbh) { $sql = 'SELECT name, color, calories FROM fruit ORDER BY name'; foreach ($dbh->query($sql) as $row) { // do your data elaboration } return $data; } $data = get_data($dbh); as you can see there is nothing magic in a web service that extracs data from a database, plain PHP comes by default with all the tools needed, more complex libraries may be included into your project (only) to solve specific problems.

Basically you can use PHP in the backend to response any kind of data, returning text with echo, returning an array, json, xml or objects. Usually there is no problem with this because PHP can work, as I said, in the backend just returning data to a frontend site using html +  javascript usually using ajax to call the backend php function. But when you have a site in the frontend and the backend in differents domains you need to use JSONP to return data from backend (PHP) and a function in frontend catching the JSONP with a callback function to arrange the data. Or you can enable CORS to work with any kind of data, like a said in first paragraph.To avoid this behaviour, it's when you can use the web services, pieces of code to work without restrictions of domains and working without restrictions of the language you use in the frontend or in the backend.Personally I use to make web services in PHP the soap class named http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/. Also there is several tutorials in internet to made it.