2008 September 18 | Dimuthu's Blog

As the implementation language for a vast space of the applications through out the web, PHP still finding a proper place in the enterprise space. Can PHP go beyond the conventional web based database back-ended applications?. Can I use public data sources to help my finical decisions?. Can I use PHP to communicate with other enterprises?. Can my PHP CRMs, CMSes interact with each other?. Can I make these interactions secure and reliable?.
Yes. Certainly you can. Now PHP is enterprise ready with WSF/PHP toolkit.

In RESTful paradigm we give a piece of data ( or in other word ‘Resource’) a unique URL. And in order to manipulate data we use HTTP verbs POST/PUT (create, update), GET (read), DELETE (delete). For an example
take the scenario of manipulating Students data in a high school. Here is how each operation is mapped to a http request (URL + HTTP verb)

HTTP request	Operation
POST api/students/ben	Create the resource (peice of data) called ben as a student. HTTP body or the url itself (e.g. api/students/ben?age=15&country=xx) may contain the required information about ben
GET api/students/ben	Retrieve the information about ben.
PUT api/students/ben	Update ben
DELETE api/student/ben	Delete the student called ‘ben’.

With the addition of all these HTTP verbs WSO2 WSF/PHP 2.0.0 become a great tool for RESTful developers. Specially with the introducing Data Services library it was so easy to make your database a REST service. I m thinking of preparing a series of application to demonstrate the power of WSF/PHP with all these new features.

This demo -RESTful School- shows how you map a URL to a peice of data. Here we use only the http “GET” method (which is the most to used in practicle data service).

Here is some description of the operations you find in there. Just check the source code for RESTful School demo to see how this is done in code level.

Operation	URL	SQL Query	Note
Get All subjects	subjects	SELECT subjectName, subjectTeacher FROM Subjects	With no parameters
Get subject information From Name	subjects/{name}	SELECT subjectName, subjectTeacher FROM Subjects where SubjectName = ?	The single parameter feed from prepared statement syntax
Get All students	students	SELECT * FROM Students	Again no parameters
Get students From Name	students/{name}	Inner Query: SELECT subjectName, marks FROM Marks m, Subjects s ". " where m.studentId = ? and m.subjectID = s.subjectId Outer Query SELECT * FROM Students where StudentName = ?	Nested query, Inner query is called from outer query
Get Marks per Students per Subjects	students/{student}/marks/{subject}	SELECT marks FROM Marks, Subjects, Students where StudentName = ?". " and SubjectName = ? and Marks.subjectId = Subjects.subjectId". " and Marks.studentID = Students.StudentId;	Two parameters, and ‘?’ in the sql query..

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Dimuthu’s Blog

September 18th, 2008PHP for Enterprise Applications

September 18th, 2008Do REST in PHP - PHP RESTful Data Services

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