Book Image

Building RESTful Web Services with PHP 7

By : Waheed ud din
Book Image

Building RESTful Web Services with PHP 7

By: Waheed ud din

Overview of this book

REST is the most wide spread and effective standard to develop APIs for internet services. With the way PHP and its eco-system has modernized the way code is written by simplifying various operations, it is useful to develop RESTful APIs with PHP 7 and modern tools. This book explains in detail how to create your own RESTful API in PHP 7 that can be consumed by other users in your organization. Starting with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of REST architecture and the new features in PHP 7, you will learn to implement basic RESTful API endpoints using vanilla PHP. The book explains how to identify flaws in security and design and teach you how to tackle them. You will learn about composer, Lumen framework and how to make your RESTful API cleaner, secure and efficient. The book emphasizes on automated tests, teaches about different testing types and give a brief introduction to microservices which is the natural way forward. After reading this book, you will have a clear understanding of the REST architecture and you can build a web service from scratch.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating a REST API for a blog in PHP


To create REST API or RESTful web service for a blog, we first to have entities. As we will storing blog entities in a database and fetching the data from a database, we first need to create a database schema for those entities.

Creating a database schema

We are going to create endpoints two resources/entities, which are :

  • Blog post
  • Post comments

So, we will be creating a database schema for these two resources.

Here is how we will design a database schema for a blog having posts comments. A post can have multiple comments and a comment always belongs to post. Here, we have SQL for the database schema. You will first need to create a database and you will need to run the following SQL to have posts and comments tables. If you haven't created the database, then create it now. You can create it via some DB UI tool, or you can run the following SQL query:

create DATABASE blog;

This will create a database with the name blog.

Before creating a blog posts table...