Tech Chorus

In the first two posts of this series, we discussed how to route REST requests to controllers and return HTTP response code. In this article I will talk about managing API keys.

Having the clients send API key within the HTTP header is convenient to handle. We can quickly check the HTTP request header and decide whether to allow or deny the request.

As a prerequisite you should be familiar writing front controller plugins. Let's write a front controller plugin that does the following:

In our last example, we used Zend_Rest_Route and Zend_Rest_Controller to demonstrate how to map requests to controller actions. We also used the response object to send text content in the HTTP response. In this article let us send appropriate HTTP response codes using the response object.

RFC 2616 describes HTTP response codes to use in various contexts.

In this example, we will use a few response codes

Title: Pro PHP XML and web services
Author: Robert Richards
Publisher: Apress
ISBN13: 978-1-59059-633-3

If you are a PHP programmer and looking to expand your knowledge in XML and web services areas, the book is a good resource. The book assumes no prior knowledge about XML and web services. It assumes you are capable of writing PHP programs independently.

Download the table of contents PDF document from the publisher.

The Zend Framework 1.9 release added a new feature - Zend_Rest_Controller. Zend_Rest_Controller and Zend_Rest_Route classes go hand in hand. In the previous versions of the Zend Framework, we have had the Zend_Rest_Server component. We still have. Since Zend_Rest_Server provides an RPC like component violating the REST architectural constraint, it is likely to be deprecated in the future versions of the Zend Framework.

Series of articles about XML-RPC with PHP.

In a previpus blog post we discussed how to consume the Technorati ping web service using XML-RPC. The PEAR package XML_RPC2 provides convenient client and server objects. You can call the remote methods as if they were the methods of the client object.

In this post, let us accomplish the same using a PEAR package XML_RPC2. We will write a client script to update Technorati when there is new post in your blog site.

If you are familiar with blogosphere you know what is Technorati.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. You can submit your blog to Technorati and ping their servers when your blog site is updated. when you ping Technorati their web crawlers read the updated information on your site.

Technorati offers an XML-RPC ping web service to allow blogs to notify content changes.

In this article we discuss how to write a PHP script to programatically ping Technorati when there is new content in your site.

Let us get familiar with some terminology.

RPC From the Wikipedia:
"Remote procedure call (RPC) is an Inter-process communication technology that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network) without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction."

Good definition. But what exactly does it mean?

In this article I will explain how to write an XML-RPC server and client in PHP.

To be able to understand the article, you have to have some idea about XML-RPC in general.

If you feel like gleaning more information about XML-RPC visit the following websites:

http://www.xmlrpc.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC

For an introduction to XML-RPC in PHP visit Introduction to XML-RPC In PHP

We all know about the URL shortening service offered by many websites. Most notable among them is tinyurl.com. There are also other free URL shortening services available on the Internet.

In this post, I will show you how to generate a short URL link to any URL from a PHP script using the short.ie URL shortening service. The actual code is only about ten lines. We will make use of the Zend_Http_Client component of the Zend Framework.