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

The need for automated tests


As we discussed earlier, in the real world, we can't test every repeatedly after every major feature or change. We can try but we are human and we can miss out on that. The bigger problem is that we may sometimes think that we tested it but miss it and because there is no record of what we tested, we can't know. If we have a separate quality assurance team or person, they will most probably test and keep a record of that. However, in case of a RESTful web service, it will take more of their time or the possibility is that the QA person will test the end product as a whole and not RESTful web service.

Just like the RESTful web service works as one component or one side of a product, there are more low-level components of the RESTful web service as well. Not just endpoints but those endpoints depends on more low-level code. So in order to make our debugging easier, we write tests for these low-level components as well. Also, this way we can ensure that these low...