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Showing posts from July, 2015

Creating a RESTful API with PHP

First, Some Background What is REST? REST, or in the full form, Representational State Transfer has become the standard design architecture for developing web APIs. At its heart REST is a stateless client-server relationship; this means that unlike many other approaches there is no client context being stored server side (no  Sessions ). To counteract that, each request contains all the information necessary for the server to authenticate the user, and any session state data that must be sent as well. REST takes advantage of the HTTP request methods to layer itself into the existing HTTP architecture. These operations consist of the following: GET - Used for basic read requests to the server PUT- Used to modify an existing object on the server POST- Used to create a new object on the server DELETE - Used to remove an object on the server By creating URI endpoints that utilize these operations, a RESTful API is quickly assembled. What is an API In this sense an