Lukas Smith has a new post to his site that asks the question "what's needed to REST in Symfony 2?" In it he talks about some of the current issues surrounding REST support in Symfony (bundles) and a "call to arms" to create something better.

I think we already have quite a nice toolchain for REST in Symfony2 with Bundles like FOSRestBundle, JMSSerializerBundle, NelmioApiDocBundle, FSCHateoasBundle and HautelookTemplatedUriBundle. What is great about these Bundles is that they are all nicely integrated with each other. But there are still some limitations which should be addressed.

Some of the still outstanding issues he points out include issues with content-type and routing, dynamic content in the NelmioApi bundle, Behat context testing, JSONP support and more. He suggests gathering together a product backlog of these items and possibly making a kickstarter to fund its development.

Andi Gutmans has a new post to his site about a recent update to the offerings on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) - it now offers Zend Server 6 as an installable option.

Zend Server 6 is the ideal application platform for mobile and web applications, and this version brings a new level of enterprise capabilities. [...] Today, I'm also pleased to share that this newest version of Zend Server is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Now, for one combined fee with Amazon Web Services, you can run your applications on a fully supported PHP application platform with Zend Server 6 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Linux.

If you're interested in what Zend Server has to offer, check out the product page on the Zend website. Zend Server handles a lot of the base level things for you and can help you get up and running quickly. It includes things like detailed monitoring, error tracking, code tracing and a nice UI to for management and configuration of the server.

Martin Shwalbe has a new post that wants to help you get started using the Zend Framework 2 for creating REST web services quickly and easily.

Today i want to show you how to build a rest application. This tutorials assume you have completed the Getting Started. I will be repeating lot of the steps allready explained in there. There is also a sample Album module which you can install from here.

He starts off by setting up the Album module to load via the module autoloader and sets up its controllers and views in the module configuration. He shows how set up the REST routes (via the "router" in the module config), how to set up the view strategy and how to make a first controller. There's also a bit about testing this newly setup module with PHPUnit.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to create a simple RESTful API with the help of the Slim PHP microframework.

Through a series of articles here at PHPMaster you've learned about what is REST and how it works. In this article, I'd like to show you how to create a RESTful web service using Slim, a PHP micro-framework inspired by Sinatra, a Ruby framework. It's well-suited for creating simple RESTful web services and comes with some minimal components like Router, Request, Response, and View. It's very simple, and is easy to understand and use.

He walks you through the basics of getting the framework downloaded and set up as well as showing you how to make some basic routes ("Hello World" style). He then uses the NotORM library to work with his database and, via a RESTful interface, give information about books, edit their information and add new ones.

PHPBuilder.com has a new tutorial posted showing how you can grab screenshots of websites using the free GrabzIt web service.

GrabzIt has just launched their screenshot service, which allows developers to easily take screenshots of websites for free using the open source GrabzIt PHP Library. To take a screenshot with GrabzIt you first need to register to get your application key and secret, once done you will be up and running in no time.

Their (quick) example shows you how to configure the library object with your keys and call the "take picture" method to grab the shot of a given site URL. You get back an ID that can then be used to fetch the screenshot from the service as needed (pulled down and put into an image file with a file_put_contents.

On PHPMaster.com today they've posted the second part of their series looking at combining a PHP backend and an Android application (by Matt Turland). In the previous article, he helped you set up some of the Android side to be able to reach out to a PHP web service. In this second part he gets into the sending and receiving of messages between the client and server.

Part 1 of this series focused on getting the Android application set up to make an HTTP request. In part 2, we'll focus on implementing the use of data serialization and compression on the Android and PHP sides of the request.

He has it broken up into the different steps of the process:

• Determining the Data Serialization Format
• Determining the Data Compression Format
• Sending the Response
• Decompressing the Response
• Deserializing the Response

He also includes a section about caching the responses you get back from the server, an important step that can save you (and your users) some headaches and maybe even give a bit of a speed boost.

In this new post to his blog Gary Hockin looks at how to create a simple RESTful web service with the features provided by the Zend Framework v2 (currently in beta).

After speaking to a prospective employer in a job interview, I was interested to try out the ZendMvcControllerRestfulController. With Zend_Json_Server in ZF1 having, shall we say, a less than sterling reputation, it was very interesting for me to see how the strategy has been implemented in ZF2. The starting point for this is simply a completely fresh clone of the ZF2 Skeleton Application. The aim is to simply allow the pre-created index controller to function as a Restful interface.

He walks you through the steps you'll need to recreate it in your application - setting up the ViewJsonStrategy, creating the router configuration for the RESTful handling and changing what the controller extends to give it the RestController's superpowers.

On PHPMaster.com today they've posted their series on "speaking REST" (part one is here), developing a PHP-based RESTful framework.

In the first article of his series, David explained how REST is more than an architectural pattern. It's a set of guiding principles that, if followed, can help you write scalable and robust applications. In the following articles, David will resume the discussion by looking at REST from the client-side of the equation. In this article though I'd like to focus on the server-side. You'll learn how to shift your thinking from the action-focused mindset that's prevalent in web development today to a more RESTful, resource oriented, approach, and see one way to structure your code and route URI requests in PHP.

He talks about the change in mindset it takes to create an effective, resource-focused RESTful service and shows some of the initial steps towards getting it all down in code (based on a simplified "front controller" that routes the request appropriately). The resources are defined as classes (like the "Restaurant" in their example) which then handles the type of request based on the request type (GET, POST, etc).

On the PHPMaster.com site there's a recent tutorial posted, the first part in a series of posts from David Shirey about building REST APIs in PHP. This first part of the series stays pretty high-level and really just introduces some common REST concepts.

Thousands of years ago when we first started building web pages, things were very simple. You'd put some text on the page, maybe even an image, and that was pretty much it. But today it's a whole different ball game. Instead of static pages there's the dynamic applications we've come to depend on. And so, how these applications are designed to communicate becomes very important. In this series I'll introduce you to the REST architecture style. In this article I'll help you to understand exactly what it is, and later I'll show you how it can be implemented in a PHP environment.

He defines the term "REST" for those not familiar and how a typical RESTful API allows other end users/software to interact directly with its data. He outlines some of the common principles of REST and finishes the post with a comparison of two HTTP verbs - PUT and POST.

In part two of his series (part one is here) on building RESTful interfaces, Satish Gopal talks about things like hypermedia and HATEOAS.

This is part 2 of "Building RESTful services". In Part 1 we talked about Level 1 and Level 2 of the Richardson Maturity Model. [...] Now imagine if you had to [find the URI] for every single website, each having a different kind of document in a different custom format. The internet would certainly not be what it is today. Yet a majority of the APIs built today make us do this. This is where the hypermedia concept comes in.

He describes the concepts behind hypermedia, giving examples of how this sort of data can be included in your API's responses. To illustrate, he includes some "link" information that then points to other data for things like "moreInfo" and "reviews" in his Book example. He also describes HATEOAS (Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State) showing how to use this "link" information to make it simpler for the end user/application to navigate around between data sources in the application.