I am on a mission to understand how to pull data from a RESTful API, parse it, store it in a database in iterations and make the most recent parsed data available for retrieval on a website.
Problem is, I have no earthly idea how to do it!
If someone could provide some simple example codes and tie it all together that would be much appreciated. The most important thing to me is understand how to grab data, how to parse it, then how to display that on a website and grab data based on what users want.
I have an example project that you can look at (https://github.com/fuzzysteve/FuzzMarket) <-- This is essentially what I am trying to accomplish. I understand how the author uses twig framework for php for template. What I don't understand is everything else.
Who does php actually interact with and obtain the data for display?
How is the data parsed and stored?
What server-side applications is he using? So far I have identified twig, but I am at a loss for what else is being used besides a web server, some form of database, php and python.
Thanks,
XeroCo
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I have a bit of experiences using PHP frameworks like Laravel to act as a backend API to a Vue.js frontend. However I am current involved in a project at work which is using a purely plain PHP backend, without an MVC approach.
I am producing a small subsection which follows a few steps.
Take user uploaded CSV from a from
Checks it using regex to make sure all the information is current formatted.
Returns all valid and failed lines back to the screen.
After the user confirms at this stage, it will then validate the data against existing database records.
It will return all valid and invalid lines again in relation to what currently exists in the database.
The user will then be able to submit all of the files to be uploaded to the database.
So far I have the Vue frontend constructed and PHP scripts to interact with the class which handles the data format, validation and upload.
I'm struggling to visualise how to receive the data from the PHP side back into my application, as I will be moving data between the two a few times. I know I could use axios to call different PHP files designed to interact with certain areas of the class. However to me this seems like a very poor way to implement such functionality. I'm wondering if there is any way I can directly call elements of the class using something like axios, where it can send and retrieve the response.
I wondering if anyone can sort with any guidance. Or point me in the direction of any examples or guides that will help me clarify this functionality. As I've been scratching my help trying to think of ways to implement this successfully. Any help would be really appreciated.
So I am building a small web app. I have set it all up on Ubuntu and I am using Wordpress. I want to use a plug-in called JSON API to pull in content from my Wordpress blog in an easy to read form and I want this to be updated to say have only 5 posts at a time being the 5 most recent ones. I’ve looked around and I was wondering if someone could help me and give me an idea on how to go about this? I am a complete beginner I have no previous experience I have not started typing any codes or anything like that because I'm not sure how to start it.
You have a few options here, and which one you choose really depends on what works for you.
WordPress has a built-in API, but this is not a JSON API, it's XML-RPC. It's pretty feature-rich and won't require you to write any code (on the WP side) to pull posts. More info here: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_Support
Read directly from the database. This is probably a faster implementation if you're reading from the same box. Simply connect to the database WordPress uses and query the posts table directly.
Find a JSON API plugin that suits your needs. It's difficult to recommend any as you seem to have specific requirements. Try some, and see what works for you. The downside to this is you'll need to keep the plugin up-to-date, and you're using third-party code - I'll leave it up to you whether you believe that to be a bad thing or not.
Write your own! It should be relatively straightforward to write a small script to pull in posts from the WordPress database and spit out a well-formed JSON feed.
I'm quite new to PHP. As a learning project, I'm currently building a website on which users can order products.
I don't want my website to connect to the database I have directly, but I want that process to go through an API I've made. The API has a quite simple structure: the index.php receives the call and the variables (through post) and then, depending on the type of data received, runs one of the functions in one of it's controllers.
So, the question:
How do I set up a connection between my website and my php api (on the same server) to access my database?
I have searched the web and SO for API connections but most of the questions are about the FB API and oAuth etcetera. If I have missed a similar question please inform me because then I'll delete this question.
Any help would be much appreciated, Thank you in advance!
Sounds like you want to implement a REST API. There are a boatload of tutorials and helpful links that you can find very easily to read up on this subject. (Here is a decent starting point). There are also many, many frameworks that you can use that handle RESTful interactions automatically.
EDIT:
Once you have a REST API setup, the best way to connect and interact with your API in PHP is using the cURL module. This is a good intro to the subject of using cURL in PHP.
The current preferred structure for passing data from API -> client is JSON. PHP makes it trivial to work with JSON. Within your API use json_encode to convert a PHP variable into it's JSON equivalent string. Inside your client, convert the JSON response from your API into a PHP object using the inverse function: json_decode
This is a very well known/widely used technique and there are many more nuances to consider, but this should be a sufficient intro for testing purposes. Once you understand the ideas I strongly recommend doing some google/stackoverflow searches and reading more on the subject.
I'm developing an iPhone APP and need to implement also an Web Service.
First of all I'm not a Developer and never made something big in PHP, Objective-C, xCode.
My PHP knowledge isn't also good. But let's start with my Environment.
iPhone APP (xCode 4.2, iOS5), PHP Web Service, MySQL DB
I was researching the WEB and most People tend more to REST than SOAP. I think i see also the advantages of REST (using of simple HTTP Verbs (get, post, delete etc...), but that's not the main point here...
I think I understand the main goal of the REST Architecture and tried to make a little concept with an URI and Verb Mapping. Here just a simple example of the mapping:
/location/{location_id}/product
/location/{location_id}/product/{product_id}
Both are GET operations who should get me ether a single product or all products of a location.
How would a simple PHP REST Web Server look like with these functions?
Another part should implement a User Authentication from the iPhone. Somehow i need to store the user session, right now I don't have any idea how to make that. The goald is that if only a user is logged in, he could review the product.
Now I've researched also the Web but couldn't find an easy step-by-step Tutorial.
Do you know any good Tutorials which will help me achieve my goal? :)
A lot of people prefer using PHP Frameworks like ZEND. This seems very interesting, but it seems like a big package with a lot of modules.
Does someone know exactly which Modules are needed to get my Web Service working?
This is quite a good tutorial, it uses the codeigniter framework which makes the learning curve a bit steeper but makes it a lot more powerful in the long run.
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/working-with-restful-services-in-codeigniter-2/
If you want to build this the custom way it's actually very easy to do if you want to return information in the JSON format especially for php5 which is generally well supported amongst hosts these days.
Essentially the steps are like this:
Pass in product id via url and retrieve using GET i.e. service.php?product_id=10
Query database and return data for product id that was passed in
Store returned data in an array
Set header content-type to application/json
json_encode the result (json_encode)
That way when you call that url in a browser you will get a nice JSON formatted array result in a key:value pair manner. And as of iOS5 json parser comes with the framework (for earlier versions SBJson is a good framework to use (SB JSON))
I have a general question regarding quality of writing code ...
I'm working on website, that outputs data from MySQL with PHP and it is being called with $.get() / $.ajax() with jQuery....
Now my question is .. the data I´m exporting for example: an array of comments (from class Comments) for a specific post, and this array is being returned from PHP as a string with its HTML manipulation (return '<div id="this->$data"> this->$data</div>';) and with the JQuery manipulation, I´m adding all the comments as list elements or anything else to a specific html element.
Is it useful to do this? Or it is better to send the array in a variable to jQuery, and then work with its elements and make the dynamic html code directly in JavaScript/jQuery..
If that was confusing, is it better to generate the html code in PHP when returning /echoing, or to generate the html code in jQuery after receiving the core data from the php?
I know there are other methods like XML JSPN, I'm just asking here about the efficient with generating HTML to manipulate core data (example: Array or Core Json data)
Let me elaborate on AlberVo's answer
The PHP file which is generating the data, if it is going to be called from possibly other sources, say from an iPhone app, or a command line application or a desktop application, or even if say 2 months down the line you think your website's front-end is going to be say Flash based, then its better to keep your PHP code front-end agnostic and just return xml/json/yaml.
If you know its going to remain a HTML/Javascript based front-end and front-end load speed is an issue, then you can do all the hard work of converting your data into HTML in the PHP file.
In the end personally, I'd say stick to just generating front-end agnostic xml/json/yaml. You never know what direction of the code the future may bring. And architecting your design this way keeps you flexible a.k.a your front-end and middle-tier are loosely coupled.
A few more advantages to such an approach (which really just arise from the loose coupling)
Work organization. If in the future someone else is also working on this project one of you can work on the middle-ware and the other on the front-end as long as you respect the json/xml/yaml in between. Your work is not going to affect the other's.
Testing. Using a xml/json/yaml also allows you to unit tests your PHP code and front-end easier. Your test data is just xml/json/yaml.
The way I decide on this is if I foresee using the data for things other than that specific use, then it is better to return the raw data such as json or xml.
You will want to consider which part of your application should control your page structure and layout. Do you want your page structure to be defined by the PHP script that just returns data? Or do you want to define the page structure in the page itself, and let the PHP script just return the data as needed.
This is an issue addressed by the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern. If you follow the MVC pattern, you will separate logic from presentation, rather than mixing the two. This allows your application to remain as flexible as possible, and also promotes code reuse.