Continuing on with his webcast series looking at using the Slim microframework to create a RESTful web service with JSON Output, John Lebensold takes the code from the previous tutorials (part one, two, three) and adds handling for DELETE to remove values from the data.

This tutorial will show you how to add jQuery RESTful calls for using the DELETE verb when deleting items via a JSON REST interface.

You'll definitely need to check out either the previous tutorials in the series to follow along with the code or grab the current source to see how everything's structured.

In a recent post to his blog Giorgio Sironi takes a look at HTTP "verbs" and their handling in PHP, both on the incoming and outgoing sides.

While PHP is capable of performing HTTP requests towards external servers with any method, either via the HTTP extension or by opening streams directly, the support of the various GET, POST, PUT and other verbs on the receiving side of HTTP requests is a bit more complicated.

He notes that the "more interesting" ones are defined in the HTTP 1.1 spec and, unfortunately, those are ones not natively supported by PHP (like POST and GET are). He recommends a workaround for the problem so you can still work with data that clients PUT or DELETE - using a fopen call to the "php://input" stream on the connection and pulling in the raw data. Not idea, but definitely functional.

In a new post to his blog Keith Casey shares a few tips on naming conventions that can help increase readability in your code and make maintenance simpler in the future.

In my regular web wanderings recently, I found a great post entitled "The 7 Worst Verbs Programmers Use In Function Calls" and couldn't help but be reminded of a system that I worked on a few years ago. The core function of the system was named - no kidding - "doStuff". Everything in the application led towards that, used it, and then did other things as a result.

He suggests a structure he uses - "verbAjectiveNounStructure". Starting with an action, moving to a description of the action, to the target of the action and finally an optional structure - how the returned data is formatted.