REST practicices on PHP, rewrite and http-verbs

Question

I'm implementing a REST service in php.

q1. Can I split the controller and resource?

http://myserver/myCtrl.php?res=/items/1

q2. if not, is the standard specs (if any exists) for rewrites on iis, apache, nginx etc to survive the http-verb over the rewrite?

If not, how to solve?

Answer 1

For APIs (I have a framework for such) I tend to have a URL structure that looks as follows:

http://domain.com/api/[resource]/[id]/[subresource]

I pass all requests to a front controller with a .htaccess file that parses incoming requests and passes the request off to the relavant controller. So my index.php looks similar to the following at the very simplest:

<?php

$request = explode('/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/'));

$resource_name = ucfirst($request[0]).'Controller';
$http_verb = strtolower($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']);

$controller = new $resource_name;

$response = call_user_func_array(array($controller, $http_verb), array($request));

header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo json_encode($response);

So if you call http://domain.com/api/news, then it will attempt to instantiate a class called NewsController, and if it's a GET request then the get() method of that class, or post() for a POST request, and so on. The response of that call is then returned to the client as JSON.

Hopefully that should be enough to get you started.

Answer 2

I had some of the same questions and found this video pretty helpful (not standards, but good practices):

http://blog.apigee.com/detail/slides_for_restful_api_design_second_edition_webinar/

I implemented my rest service by rewriting the urls through .htaccess files (mod_rewrite) and a central dispatcher so it looks like this:

http://myserver/myctrl/resource/1

My .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

Read more about rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

I have an index file that does pretty much what Martin outlined. I explode on "/" and assume first is controller, second is action, and the rest are parameters.