Chapter 1, RESTful Web Services, Introduction and Motivation, introduces you to web services, REST architecture, the RESTful web services, and its comparison to other web services such as HTTP verbs and RESTful endpoints. It also explains web services through the example of a blog and then talk about the response format and response code.

Chapter 2, PHP7, To Code It Better, includes new features and changes in PHP7 that we will either use in this book or are very important and worth discussing.

Chapter 3, Creating RESTful Endpoints, is about creating REST API endpoints for CRUD operations of a blog post in Vanilla PHP. It also explains the manual way of testing API endpoints through a REST client named Postman.

Chapter 4, Reviewing Design Flaws and Security Threats, reviews what we have built in the preceding chapter and highlights the problems and flaws in it so that we can improvise later.

Chapter 5, Load and Resolve with Composer, an Evolutionary, is about an evolutionary tool in the PHP ecosystem: composer. This is not just an autoloader or package installer, but a dependency manager. So, you will learn about composer in this chapter.

Chapter 6, Illuminating RESTful Web Services with Lumen, introduces you to a micro-framework named Lumen, in which we will rewrite our RESTful web services endpoints and review how this tool will significantly improve our speed and application structure.

Chapter 7, Improving RESTful Web Services, equips us to improve what we did in the preceding chapter; you will learn how to improve RESTful web services. We will create authentication and make a Transformer to separate how JSON structure should look. Also, we will improve in terms of security and learn about SSL.

Chapter 8, API Testing – Guards on the Gates, introduces the need of automated tests. Will introduce different type of tests and then focus on API testing. We will then cover an automated testing framework named CodeCeption and write API tests in it.

Chapter 9, Microservices, is about the microservices architecture. We will understand the benefits and challenges of microservices and look into some of possible solutions and trade-offs.

Although I used Ubuntu, any operating system with PHP7 installed on it will work fine. The only thing required other than PHP7 will be an RDBMS. This book uses MySQL-related settings when connecting to database, so MySQL is ideal, but MariaDB or PostgreSQL will also be fine.

This book is written for the following audience:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The randGen() method takes two parameters defining the range of the returned value."

A block of code is set as follows:

<?php
function add($num1, $num2):int{
    return ($num1+$num2);
}

echo add(2,4); //6
echo add(2.5,4); //6

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<?php
function add($num1, $num2):int{
return ($num1+$num2);
}

echo add(2,4); //6
echo add(2.5,4); //6

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text.

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of. To send us general feedback, simply e-mail [email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message. If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.