Some really basic questions to do with RESTful and PHP - php

Question

I am working on a first attempt at a RESTful API. I have designed some simple classes to represent each element of my system including a Message and Room class (it's a chat application with any amount of rooms containing any amount of messages).
I constantly see URIs in the form of, for example
/room (this would get all rooms)
/room/{room_id} (this would create, update or delete a room with this ID)
/room/{room_id}/message (this would get all messages from a room with the specified ID)
/room/{room_id}/meesage/{message_id} (this would create, update or delete a message with this id)
So I guess my two questions are:
1) How do I redirect these requested URIs to my single handling script (located in /api/api.1.0.0.php)
2) How do I request these URIs with the correct HTTP verb like put, delete, update etc.
EDIT: I should add that I am looking to do this without a framework.

Answer 1

Here is how to use mod_rewrite on apache to redirect all requests to a single script. You will need to use apache and have mod_rewrite installed/setup (it is installed on most shared hosting and is easy to add to a self managed system).
Create a .htaccess file in the sub-folder where the API exists under the document root. Add the following to the file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?URI=$1 [L,QSA]
The first condition will make sure the file doesn't exist so you can still load files that do exist (without it, requests for even valid files will rewrite). The second condition does the same but checks that it isn't a valid directory that is being requested. The last line, the rule, captures the URI and tells apache to load index.php instead passing the URI to the URI get parameter. At the end of the rule are flags, L and QSA. The L flag tells apache to stop processing rules if this one is satisfied and the QSA tells apache to automatically append any query string (get string) parameters that were passed.
You can then access the URI in php using $_GET['URI']. A simple $URI = explode('/', $_GET['URI']); will get you a nicely formatted array of each parameter passed.

Answer 2

As for directing to correct part of the app after requesting particular url you should read about routers. All of the major MVC frameworks will have advanced routing solutions. http://framework.zend.com/manual/current/en/modules/zend.mvc.routing.html
If you want to go without framework and use single scripts Apache mod_rewrite is your friend.
For creating requests using different http methods use any of the REST clients like Postman for Chrome.
EDIT:
.htaccess example:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [NC,L]