Restful Php Web Services

Learn the basic architectural concepts and step through examples of consuming and creating RESTful web services in PHP

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a form of software architecture; systems that follow it are often called RESTful. It is the architectural style that drives the World Wide Web (the motivation for REST was to capture elements that made the Web successful), and RESTful web services use simple protocols already familiar to web developers. RESTful web services are found in lots of places with big name Web APIs such as Flickr, and Yahoo search following a REST-based approach.

With any architectural style or approach, struggling with its basic concepts is just one problem – implementation in your favorite language is another, and that's where this book comes in. If you're a PHP developer, this book will show you how to create and consume RESTful web services in PHP, and make your services work well in the context of the Web.

You will learn about the basic concepts of REST, and then look at PHP tools, libraries and techniques for working with RESTful web services. You will see how to use other RESTful services from your PHP applications, and also how to engineer your PHP applications to make them RESTful.

This book is about implementing RESTful web services in PHP, and so the book is packed with example code and careful explanations.

What you will learn from this book

• Basic concepts of REST architecture
  
• Consuming public REST-style services from your PHP applications
  
• Consuming RESTful web services, such as those from leading APIs such as Flickr, and Yahoo Web Search
  
• Making your own PHP applications accessible to other applications through a RESTful API
  
• REST support in the popular Zend framework
  
• Debugging RESTful services and clients
  
• A case study of designing a RESTful PHP service from the ground up, and designing clients to consume the service

Approach
The book explains the basic concepts associated with the REST architectural style, but the emphasis is on creating PHP code for consuming and creating RESTful services in PHP. There is plenty of example PHP code to illustrate the concepts, with careful explanations of how the code works.

Who this book is written for
This book targets PHP developers who want to build or make use of RESTful web services, or explore the options available to them in PHP. You will need to know the basics of PHP development, but no knowledge of REST is assumed, nor any knowledge of creating web services generally.

About the Author
Samisa Abeysinghe is Director, Engineering at WSO2. Samisa pioneered the Apache Axis2/C effort and architected the core of the Apache Axis2/C Web services engine. He continues to be an active contributor in the Apache Axis2/C project. His involvement in open-source projects began in 2004 when he started working with the Apache Axis C/C++ project.

Prior to his current role, Samisa played the project lead role for the WSO2 Web services Framework for PHP project, which provides comprehensive support for building both SOAP and REST services and clients.