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

PHP7.1


Till now, the preceding features that discussed were PHP7.0 related. However, the recent version of PHP7 is PHP7.1, so it is worth discussing the important features of PHP7.1 as well, at least the features which we will use, or features that are worth knowing and using somewhere in our work. In order to run the following code, you need to have PHP7.1 installed so, to do this, you can use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update
(optional) sudo apt-get remove php7.0
sudo apt-get install php7.1 (from comments)

Remember that this is not an official upgrade path. The PPA is well-known, and is relatively safe to use.

Nullable types

If we are type hinting data types of parameters or types of function, then it is important that there should be a way to pass or return the NULL data type instead of type mentioning as parameter or return type. There can be different scenarios when we may need this, but what we need to do is place a ? before the data type...