Can you use REST in PHP? If so how?

Question

I am developing my own PHP Library and I would like to call RESTful web-services from my API. Can this be done in PHP and if so what are the basics in doing so?

Answer 1

Since REST is the application of the same methods of the HTTP protocol to the design of client-server architectures and PHP is already so good to handle HTTP protocol requests such as GET and POST. PHP is specially suited to make developing REST services easy.

Remember REST is the application of the same http patterns that already exists.

So if you currently have an application that does something like:

1. HTML Form
2. PHP Process
3. HTML Output in a table

So to make it REST you would need to:

1. Accept parameters from the web. This is easy since you will receive the parameters either as get or post... so it is basically the same.

2. PHP process

3. Output in either JSON or XML. And that is it!

   Is pretty easy.

Now the difficult part is to make your API (the functions and URLs) that you will generate to be programmer friendly.

In that case I suggest you look at the flickr API as an example is very developer friendly easy to guess and has good documentation.

For more info on APIs look at this presentation: How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters (Joshua Bloch)

Finally a RESTful API should implement also the PUT and DELETE methods of the http protocol when it makes sense

For example if you had a delete action in your api, said service should receive the delete method from the http protocol. Instead of the more common thing of sending an action parameter as part of a post request.

Edit: Replaced "Php is rest by default" with "Since REST is the application of the same methods of the HTTP protocol to the design of client-server architectures and PHP is already so good to handle HTTP protocol requests such as GET and POST. PHP is specially suited to make developing REST services easy."

And also added the final note that you should implement the appropiate PUT or DELETE methods when that action makes sense for your api.

Answer 2

You may want to look at this article and the follow-up: http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/create-a-rest-api-with-php/

Your question is very open-ended, so this tutorial may be the best starting point.

The link above is no longer working so check out this tutorial:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/a-beginners-introduction-to-http-and-rest/

Answer 3

I developed a class that is the PHP native SoapServer class' REST equivalent.

You just include the RestServer.php file and then use it as follows.

class Hello
{
  public static function sayHello($name)
  {
    return "Hello, " . $name;
  }
}

$rest = new RestServer(Hello);
$rest->handle();

Then you can make calls like this:

http://myserver.com/path/to/api?method=sayHello&name=World

(Note that it doesn't matter what order the params are provided in the query string. Also, the param key names as well as the method name are case-insensitive.)

Answer 4

Can't hurt to go back to the original source of the term REST, and be sure that you understand what that means.

Answer 5

If you are thinking about the client side of things, I would suggest checking out Matt Sukowski's PEST.

You will find the repository on GitHub: https://github.com/educoder/pest

Also check out this thread: PHP REST Clients

Update 2013/12/13:
This is very much a live open source project, Matt Sukowsky handed it over to new caretakers this summer because he didnt feel he could spare enough time, and there has been lots and lots of commits since then. So Pest is better than ever for doing Rest in PHP :)