Haafiz Waheed-ud-din Ahmad - Building RESTful Web Services with PHP 7

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: September 2017

Production reference: 1060917

ISBN 978-1-78712-774-6

www.packtpub.com

Haafiz Waheed-ud-din Ahmad has been working in the IT industry since 2008. He has mostly worked in web application development and mostly used PHP at the server side. Although most of his experience is in PHP, he is a technology agnostic person and also likes to learn and adapt to new technologies. He also acts as an adviser for startups and new developers.

He has worked on Python and JavaScript as well. He likes to experiment with new technologies, and he has also explored Golang, Scala, and Neo4J. He also has a keen interest in data science and big data domain and has worked on D3.js for data visualization. He is not just a technology enthusiast but also likes to solve day-to-day problems by the usage of technology. He blogs at http://haafiz.me/ . You can follow him on twitter at @Haafiz786.

Shuvankar Sarkar is an IT Analyst experienced in C#, .NET, PHP, and web development. He is a technology enthusiast and maintains a blog at http://shuvankar.com . You can follow him on Twitter at @sonu041. Shuvankar is interested in computer security as well.

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Web services has always been an important topic. With REST, things became simpler and better. Nowadays, RESTful web services are widely used. It was important a decade ago, but Single Page Applications (SPAs) and mobile applications have increased its usage greatly. The aim of this book is to educate PHP developers about the RESTful web services architecture, the current tools available to efficiently create RESTful web services such as a micro-framework named Lumen, automated API testing, the API testing framework, security and microservices architecture.

Although this book is specific to PHP as we will be building RESTful web services in PHP7, it is neither just about PHP7 nor just about REST. RESTful web services and implementation in PHP is what we do in this book. However, you will learn a lot more than that. You will learn about some PHP features that are new in PHP7. We will cover how we should structure our application and some common threats with respect to the web and web services. You will learn how to improve a basic RESTful web service and understand the importance of testing and the different types of testing. So it is not about just REST or PHP, but also about some minor but important programming-related stuff that is simple but makes things a lot better in the real world. At the end of this book, you will learn about an architecture named microservices.

In other words, although this book is intended for PHP developers, it will benefit them beyond just PHP. So, this book is not a cookbook, but a journey in which you start learning about RESTful webservices and PHP7 and then start building RESTful web services. You can then keep improving your RESTful web services by learning about the problems in it and fixing those. During such improvements, you will learn the different things in PHP and benefit even beyond PHP.

, 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.