Continuing on from his previous articles on working with REST in Zend Framework applications (and making the endpoints for a web service) Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new tutorial with the next logical step in the series, automatically responding to different content types in your application based on the content-type the client sends.

There's no reason you can't re-use your RESTful web service to support multiple formats. Zend Framework and PHP have plenty of tools to assist you in responding to different format requests, so don't limit yourself. With a small amount of work, you can make your controllers format agnostic, and ensure that you respond appropriately to different requests.

He talks about concerns you'll have to worry about when developing your service - grabbing teh raw input instead of the POST values (since most requests will be rawly POSTed) and what to pass that message to to decode it properly. In his example the Zend_Json and Zend_Config_Xml components make it simpler to handle the info and some code to get the results back into your script.

There's also some code for the other side of things - building the response and pushing it out to the correct views depending on the request content type, action and information.