Planning to start working on a new web application? In this tutorial, we'll discuss how to create an API-centric web application, and explain why this is essential in today's multi-platform world. [...] An API-Centric Web Application is a web application that basically executes most, if not, all its functionality through API calls. [...] Another characteristic of an API-Centric Web Application is that the API will always be stateless, meaning it can't recognize API calls by session.

He talks about how doing the work like this, though it might seem like more trouble up front, can lead to an easier time later when you need to add multi-platform support (or even open it to customers directly). In the sample application, he shows the creation of a TODO application that can create, read, update and delete items via an API. Also included is a bit of code to help secure your service with an APP ID and APP SECRET authentication set. Full code for the backend API and the frontend to interface with it can be downloaded here.

The goal of this blog post is to number one serve me as a todo list of stuff that I personally think needs to be fixed before Symfony2 can be released. Hopefully it will also entice some people to help out with these tasks. I am focusing on the medium to large tasks. There are of course still a fair number of smaller fixes that need to be applied.

Items on the list include:

• switch Security/Validation components to using message key's rather than full sentences
• Assetic documentation
• Adding a DIC aware Serializer
• Better support for SSL'ed urls and assets
• ttempt to automatically determine service scopes

We use Jira at Gravity for tracking issues and bugs. Since I'm not always on VPN or have access to our network managing my todos has been cumbersome. I've tried every Todo app out there and always fail to use them for more than 2 days. I finally saw a great article on just using a simple Todo.txt file in your Dropbox folder and working from that. It's been a dream and working out great.

His tool lets him use the Todo list example to push its contents out to the PHP script that connects to the Jira instance and make a new issue. The code is included in the post, ready for cut-and-pasting.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.

Michael comments:

This has been a long time coming and I'm glad to see it in place. I hope it will continue to help open up the development process to a larger audience. [...] This is definitely a large step for the project and I hope it'll get traction and become one of the key tools used to drive PHP forward.

And Lukas talks more about the planning behind the project:

So things are moving forward. Thanks to Pierre who set up a dokuwiki on the libgd server (if you are unware libgd is now a subproject of php.net) and Hannes for setting up a new auth API against the master.php.net user database we have a wiki up and running on wiki.php.net. [...] I am quite happy that we managed to get this far.

You can check out the wiki yourself at wiki.php.net.

The wiki is of course not opened to everyone in the world (as wikis are usually a source of big mess) but only to developers that have any type of CVS access on the cvs.php.net server.

One of the first orders of business is moving the TODO list out from its current location and into the wiki, making it simple for anyone to check out what the language developers will be working on in the future.

Of the choices, the "None" option got the most votes (33.3% in fact) followed at a large margin by "Fully customizable output with Smarty-based templates" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source". The users have spoken and they think phpDocumentor is flexible enough to handle everything from outputting in HTML/PDF formats to having a web and command-line interface.

This week's poll question asks about something a little more common - which of the items in the list are your favorite PHP game (and yes, there's "All" and "None" options). Check it out and cast your vote today!

WASP (Web Application Structure for PHP) is a three-tier framework built on PHP 5. Lately, more software engineers are moving from cumbersome "enterprise" languages such as Java and C# to languages such as Python and Ruby and PHP. With version 5, PHP has finally reached the point where these developers can feel at home in what used to be considered a hacker's language. By demonstrating that it is possible to create and use complicated, "enterprise-class" frameworks effectively in PHP 5, WASP will help more developers make the switch.

They look at working with WASP 1.1 to create a project (in this case, a ToDo list), build out its properties, setting up the model/view/controller structure for the site, and wrap it all up with the interface on top (and the interaction with the framework it needs). The article walks you through every step of the way, too, giving clear code examples and explaining what everything is doing...]]> Fri, 20 Jan 2006 07:24:51 -0600