I've designed my database diagram(11 entites) for my prototype application. I need to have an REST API on top of this that will allow me to build a prototype android tablet application that talks to it.
Considering this is only for prototype purposes. What would be the quickest way to get a API up and running that would allow me to get, put, delete etc..
Security at this point isn't an issue so even if all add edit delete were open that would be fine.
My initial idea is to build this with PHP and MySQL maybe using the Yii framework to help but I feel there might be something that might be faster for my purpose.
Any thoughts or recommendations or advice?
It is worth looking into API rapid-prototyping tools like Apify (tutorial) since you're starting from scratch. If you're planning to have both an API and a Web site accessing the same data, consider using one framework for both as it helps prevent duplicating logic. CakePHP and Yii are good examples of multipurpose frameworks that are suited for this type of development.
If Python is an option, it is trivial to use a light-weight http framework to build a REST API that accesses a database.
Here's a snippet for a fully functioning http server using the itty framework: https://github.com/toastdriven/itty/blob/master/examples/web_service.py and https://github.com/toastdriven/itty/blob/master/examples/posting_data.py
Look at this project which allows you to create an API REST in seconds.
https://github.com/GeekyTheory/Automatic-API-REST
Features
Creation a powerful API REST of your MySQL Data Base in Seconds.
Management of the API in situ, it is not neccesary an extra data base.
Private tables and fields.
Custom queries.
Installation
Clone the repo.
git clone https://github.com/GeekyTheory/Automatic-API-REST/
Place it in your web folder /var/www/YourWebPage/
Open the file config.php and complete all the fields with the server credencials.
Go to domain.com/AutomaticaApiRest
Related
Background:
I am working on a web application, that I plan to launch with iPhone and Android versions in the near future, and I have some questions about developing an API for use by the different front-ends.
I Started with This:
I was reading this TutsPlus tutorial, which talks about creating an API-centric web application, meaning that all of your browser calls and smartphone app calls are routed through the API.
What especially got me excited, was this statement in the tutorial from Twitter:
One of the most important architectural changes is that Twitter.com is now a client of our own API. It fetches data from the same endpoints that the mobile site, our apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and every third-party application use.
The above statement reflects, what I would ideally like to create.
Then I Saw This:
I found this TutsPlus tutorial, which talks about, how to build a REST API for CodeIgniter. This was good, because I am developing my application in CodeIgniter, using the Modular Extensions plugin - HMVC, and I thought it would be perfect for my purposes.
The only thing, that I'm somewhat lost in, is the way Phil Sturgeon seems to suggest to create the API. He suggests to have all of your front-end code modules completed and then create an API for each of the modules in their respective directories (not necessarily in that order). This would be fine if I didn't want it to be API-centric.
And I Want to Know How to Do This:
How should I proceed to get a blend of both tutorials:
API-centric application that can be used by a browser application as well as separate mobile applications
REST API for CodeIgniter (with HMVC modules)
Should I:
Just follow the API-centric tutorial and try to tailor it to my needs?
Follow the CodeIgniter-specific tutorial and use Phil Sturgeon's advice for how to implement it with HVMC?
A combination of both?
Neither?
Take a look at Eating your own Dogfood by Nick Jackson. These are slides from CICONF 2012 where he details how this all works.
Building your API first is a great idea, then your application can use the API to fetch the data itself. This is of course a little slower as you're adding a HTTP request on data, but locally its not too bad and if you use HMVC to make the request it's even quicker.
In the tutorial I didn't get into HMVC because it's an extra subject, but it can be awesome for adding modular API's. In some simple applications I just make a /api folder like the tutorial suggested but PyroCMS Professional has an API module and a sexy route to allow modular API stuff:
$route['api/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/(:any)'] = '$1/api/$2';
$route['api/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)'] = '$1/api/index';
This means I can have a "api.php" controller in every module and still use the /api/controller/method syntax or even /api/controller if you have function index_get().
I would strongly suggest you grab PyroCMS Professional for this feature. Yep you gotta pay, but it handles user key generation, authorisation, logging, etc all out of the box and handles your website too.
I'm thinking in create a webapplication with cakephp but consuming python's appengine webservice. But, to install cakephp etc, I need to configure the database. Appengine uses another kind of datastorage, with is different from mysql, etc.
I was thinking in store the data in appengine, and using the python webservices, and with the cakephp application comunicating with the webservice, for insert and retrieve data.
Is there any good resource for this, or is it unpossible.
Obs: also opened for a possibility for developing the webapplicaiton completely in python running in appengine. If anyone has a good resource.
Thanks.
I think that you should try different solution: http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
It appears that CakePHP is a MVC framework that's very similar to django, which is included in app engine for python. I'm not sure why you would want to store your data in google app engine, unless you're dealing with an extremely large amount of data, in which case you're likely comfortable enough working in python to just make the app work entirely on GAE.
See the official docs for more info:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/overview.html
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/django.html
What you can do is run your CakePHP app on a standard LAMP web host and access the GAE Data Store through a REST or RPC web service. This isn't such a bad idea if you already have a CakePHP front-end that deals with RPCs in the backend, but if your Cake app stores all it's Models in MySQL it could take considerable effort to adapt it.CakePHP Models abstract their storage method using the DataSource class. You might be able to find a DataSource class that uses REST or RPC. However, if you don't have a very considerable investment in CakePHP Controllers and Templates I would suggest simply building your app entirely in GAE
You can not run PHP on GAE. If you run PHP somewhere, it is a bad architecture to go over the internet for your data. It will be slooooow and a nightmare to develop in.
You should store your data where you run your php, unless you must have a distributed, globally scaling architecture, which afaiu not the case.
There's a detailed tutorial on getting CakePHP up using the PHP runtime that Google recently announced. http://aymanrb.blogspot.com/2013/05/cakephp-deployment-on-google-app-engine.html
I'm writing an iPhone app as a hobby project and it will need a web service to provide it with data. It's not very different from what I do at work, but at work I only write views and controllers. Someone else is responsible for writing the model and usually the clients provide the web service.
I have done some web programming before, back when everyone were using MySQL and PHP, so my skills are a bit outdated, but I'm confident that I would be able to pull it of using the techniques I already know. However, I don't want to waste my time using obsolete tools. I've figured out that the state of the art would be to write a REST API. I was thinking that there should be some pretty good frameworks out there that pretty much just gives you a REST API with CRUD functionality as soon as you've defined a model.
I guess my question is: What would be the fastest way to get a REST API up and running? I really just want to focus on writing the iPhone app and not spend too much time on this API. It would be great if I could get web administration and revision history too. I should also add that the API isn't supposed to be public, so support for authentication would be great as well.
Just to be clear. I wouldn't mind a PHP framework. In fact it could possibly be better since I know that my current hosting supports it.
EDIT:
The links below which apparently were good for 3 years are no longer working so I went and found a couple of new tutorials that I think are going to stick around for a while. These are on the Ray Wenderlich site, a very well respected ios dev tutorial site. The first article actually references the broken links below but it is complete within itself:
How To Write A Simple PHP/MySQL Web Service for an iOS App
and the second one has a little twist to it. It used parse.com on the backend and AFNetworking. Both of which are quite excellent.
How To Synchronize Core Data with a Web Service – Part 1
I have fixed the broken links below by finding the articles in the way back machine. People seem to like the links so I will keep them. The links above should provide more food for thought.
I am doing exactly the same thing with my iphone app. I found this article on building a RESTful API in PHP:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130910164802/http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/create-a-rest-api-with-php/
and there is also a followup article here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130323001500/http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/making-restful-requests-in-php/
with a link to source code at the bottom of the article.
I have programmed a REST API in ZEND Framework using the Zend_Rest_Controller, on the iPhone I used ASIHTTPRequest. My experience with both where good. At the beginning I had some trouble setting up ZEND and connecting it to mySQL, but once I figured out how to do it I was able to write the API very quickly. I can share more information with you if you have any further questions.
EDIT: There seems to be no official documentation on Zend_Rest_Controller. This link describes how to use it to create your API. You simply have to disable rendering in the init() of your subclass and implement the methods for each REST call.
Just to let you know:
I ended up using Ruby on Rails.
EDIT: Since this answer has been downvoted for not providing the reason behind choosing Ruby on Rails and also no instructions on how to write a REST API with it, I thought I would give you my motivation and some simple instructions.
I started reading a book about Ruby on Rails and realized that all I needed to do was to use scaffolding and I got a JSON REST API for free.
Here's a good guide to get you started: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
When you have your Ruby on Rails environment up and running, creating your REST API isn't harder than running:
$ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
(Example from the above link.) I also found that Rails is very easy and free to deploy to heroku, which meant that I didn't have to pay for hosting for my very basic, low traffic, REST API. There are many other reasons why I am very happy to work with Ruby on Rails, but that's beyond the context of this question.
I followed a quite simple tutorial for creating RESTful APIs with PHP:
Corey Maynard - Creating a RESTful API with PHP
The main concept includes:
one abstract class that handles the parsing of the URI and returning the response, and
one concrete class that consists of just the endpoints for the API.
What about Python?
I'd use Python, Django and Piston.
I'd generate Django models from your
existent DB using inspectdb.
Add the Django admin to your models.
Add Django Piston to your app.
Profit.
With no experience with Python or Django probably it'll take you a day to develop this solution and all code is unit tested and proved to work.
If you want to use PHP I recommend using the CodeIgniter framework with Phil Sturgeon's REST server:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/working-with-restful-services-in-codeigniter-2
https://github.com/philsturgeon/codeigniter-restserver
Checkout the following PHP class that follows MVC.
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5080-PHP-Implement-REST-Web-services-servers.html
Hope this helps.
If you already know PHP, there's nothing wrong with a PHP/MySQL backend. You can send all responses in iPhone-compatible plist xml format, and instantly turn the response into a NSDictionary/NSArray/NSNumber data structure with this short snippet of code:
NSString *response = [request responseString];
NSData* plistData = [response dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSPropertyListFormat format;
NSString *errorStr;
NSDictionary* plist = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:plistData
mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable
format:&format
errorDescription:&errorStr];
I also use the ASIHTTP package for forming URLs, sending asynchronous requets, and receiving the responses, I highly recommend it:
http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/
You should use whatever languages you are comfortable with for the web service. Any language that can formulate REST responses to requests is fine.
That said, if you want to get something running quickly, I suggest using Python on Google App Engine. It's free and you can use Java instead of Python if you so desire. App Engine supports authentication using OpenID and/or Google Accounts (not sure if they're mutually exclusive) so that should make things easier to code.
As far as making the requests on the iOS device, I suggest using ASIHTTPRequest.
Another option is restSQL, an ultra-lightweight persistence framework. See http://restsql.org. It supports MySQL and PostgreSQL and runs in a standard Java EE container, e.g. Apache Tomcat.
restSQL is a very unconventional data access layer. restSQL is not an object-oriented view of the database. It presents flat or hierarchical "views" of relational database tables. These views are query-able and updatable through a simple REST-based HTTP or Java API. The HTTP interface is based on REST principles, which use HTTP’s built-in features, rather than abstracting away from them.
You want a 'REST API with CRUD functionality' and that's exactly restSQL's sweet spot. You could do this with no code. Simply define your SQL Resources via XML files and start doing HTTP calls against them with full CRUD capability.
We are looking to build a PHP web application to manage data that is available only through a 3rd party REST like interface.
We would like to use an existing PHP framework to do this, we're considering cakephp and codeigniter, but are open to other options.
We expect the biggest problem will be creating models that utilise the REST API as a data source instead of a local database.
I've written a base ReST datasource plugin for CakePHP and am using it in lots of other plugins that interact with ReSTful APIs. Plugins I've released so far are YahooGeoPlanet and bit.ly and I'm also currently working on ones for Google Apis (YouTube and Analytics), Twitter, Twitpic and Facebook. They use the CakePHP's excellent HttpSocket class that deceze mentions.
Have a look at those CakePHP plugins and you should be able to see how simple but powerful they are.
You might look at Zend_Rest_Client, which I've never used, but appears worth a look.
Failing that, Zend_Http_Client is pretty solid for abstracting away all the curl ugliness.
Either one can be used independently of the rest of the Zend Framework stuff, and should interoperate just fine with other frameworks.
You can implement it as a Datasource in Cake, which to the Model and therefore to the rest of the application behaves exactly as a database would. Internally the Datasource can dynamically fetch the data using cURL or the Cake HttpSocket. Have a look at the Twitter API example.
Does anybody know a good web framework that includes an ORM mapper and allows straight forward implementation of web services? I'm looking for a framework written in PHP or C++. I'm looking for the following features (not all of them required, some will do nicely)
data definition in one place used by database and web service
WSDL generation
XML output/JSON output
boilerplate code generation
So what I would like is a framework that let's me specify the objects, the web service functions on those objects and then generate everything that is required leaving me to fill the business logic (connecting the database to the web service).
Anything like that out there?
Background information for why I need this:
I'm looking into creating a web project: the client is a rich web application that fetches all its data using AJAX. It will be completely custom made using only a low level javascript library. The server back end is supposed to serve static content and javascript (basically the rich web application) and to provide a RESTful web service API (which I would like to implement using aforementioned framework).
I would recommend using Zend_Framework and replacing Zend_Db with Doctrine as your ORM.
You can use Zend_Service to consume webservices and Zend_Rest_Controller to serve a REST API.
There are some good screencasts on integrating Doctrine and Zend here. If you have alot of PHP experience, it shouldn't take very long to integrate. I believe there are even some sample integrations on Github.