Lorna Mitchell has added a new post to her blog about adding in PUT variables to your Zend Framework Zend_Request object (useful for web services).

Its very simple: I have extended Zend_Controller_Action with my own, and all controllers inherit from here. This has a routeAction() which grabs the incoming variables from a PUT request and sets them as parameters within the usual $this->getRequest() scope, then forwards on the request.

Her example adds a call to the isPut method to check for the PUT request type and, if found, takes in the request values and pushes them back into the action's parameter values. Then the controller can make a call back to the request object to pull in the parameters when needed.

In a new post to his blog Ian Selby looks at working with REST requests in PHP. He includes some of the basics of REST too, for those not completely familiar with the term.

APIs have become a very commonplace part of many popular web sites and services...especially REST APIs. I've already discussed how you can roll your own REST API for your PHP apps, but I've also received countless requests to go over how to actually make RESTful requests. That's exactly what we'll take a look at in this article

His tool of choice is the curl extension, making it simple to create a class wrapper with methods like executePost, executeGet, setAuth and, of course, execute. He outlines the class and gives the code blocks that fit inside each of the major functions. In the end you'll have a class that can make GET, POST, PUT and DELETE requests and be able to correctly parse the response.

Kris Jordan recently posted five tips to help you get a "more correct" REST interface in your application.

As we entered a programmable web of applications with APIs the decision to ignore HTTP gave us problems we're still dealing with today. We have an internet full of applications with different interfaces (GET /user/1/delete vs. POST /user/delete {id=1}). With REST we can say /user/1 is a resource and use the HTTP DELETE verb to delete it.

Here's the five (six?) tips:

• Using PUT and DELETE methods
• Send Custom HTTP/1.1 Headers
• Send Meaningful HTTP Headers
• Don't Use $_SESSION
• Test with cURL or rest-client
• Use a RESTful PHP Framework

In this new post to the symfony blog today Fabien talks about some of the "small things" that help to make this latest version of the framework (1.2) even better.

As for every symfony version, we try to simplify the API and make it more intuitive and powerful. Here are some examples that you will soon enjoy in symfony 1.2.

There's four included in the post (and many more in the framework):

• Application name in CLI tasks
• Native PUT and DELETE support from the browser
• Shortcuts in the response
• sfValidatorSchemaCompare validator

For a recent REST web service project, Lorna Mitchell had to put together a server for the remote clients to use. She started with a GET request then moved to handling a POST request then to a PUT request - that's where the difficulty came in:

PHP doesn't have a built-in way to do this, and at first I was a little confused as to how I could reach this information. It turns out that this can be read from the incoming stream to PHP, php://input.

Pulling from that stream gave her the raw data she needed (nicely urlencoded too) that she could parse out and use. She includes a simple example that has a check for the REQUEST_TYPE in the _SERVER superglobal to see how the request should be handled (PUT versus GET).

Ben Ramsey has recently blogged about some of the research and bit of development that he's done to add "more correct" functionality to the Zend Framework for working with RESTful interfaces - proper PUT and DELETE support.

I've recently been wrapped up in an effort to design and implement a RESTful API using the Atom Protocol for a project at work. We are using the Zend Framework as the underlying framework for the project, so, in order to follow the Atom Protocol, I needed to support the HTTP methods PUT and DELETE

Since the Zend Framework has been playing such a prominent role in the development, he's been digging into the Zend_Rest_Server component code and isn't too happy about its support for PUT and DELETE. As a result, he's proposed methods that might help resolve things such as isGet, isDelete, isOptions and getEntityBody. He' even created a patch to make the needed changes.

Chris Hartjes has a quick post (but complete with code) about moving files around a bit differently than the norm - it's his method for using a HTTP-PUT to push a file out.

A work project is getting close to 0.1 status. Pretty underwhelming, I know. One of the last 'milestones' for 0.1 is taking these wonderful XML documents that my web app creates and sends them to an internal web service. This web service will accept documents via an HTTP PUT [...] so I dug around a bit on the web and put together some code.

The code is a generic "publish" method that opens a stream to the remote server and, in a binary format, pushes the contents of a local file and parses out the response.