Tech Chorus

One thing often overlooked when creating RESTful services is returning appropriate HTTP response codes. Your controllers and/or view scripts should set codes such as 201 (created), 204 (no content -- useful for delete responses), etc. Make sure you get familiar with both HTTP response codes and headers, as well as the details of the REST specification, when you start developing REST applications -- they'll make your apps interoperate well with a variety of clients out of the box.

Thanks for your post a good starting point on REST with zf. ZF has evolved quickly still working with version 1.0 in some projects. Any idea how much overhead Zend_Rest_Route brings to the table?

Awesome! Thank you.
This post gave me a kick start on RESTful API development in ZF.
I'm definitely looking forward to read your upcoming posts of this topic.

Might also be interested in http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFPROP/Zend_Rest_Controller_DbTable

I'd like to get some feedback on the proposal before starting to code it into the framework core.

Thank you for introducing the REST .
Looking forward to see the rest of the articles . Also Thanks to Mathew for pointing out http response code .

And what about traditional forms?
How do I post/update new articles from Zend_Form?

Excellent article, simple like that!, thanks very much!!!!!!

Not loving the ZF REST solution so I wrote a post called 'RESTful PHP Applications Despite Zend Framework':

http://mike.mykanjo.co.uk/2009/11/22/restful-php-applications-despite-ze...

contains link to my alternative solution called 'Resauce':

http://github.com/mikekelly/Resauce

Coolness. This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Okay this one got me for a while. Having spent a few hours figuring out what was going on, I finally came across this snippet in the Zend Framework docs;

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.plugins.html#zend.co...

You will need that to handle PUT request params.

Thank you for this article. It really helped to simplify some things I was confused about. I can't wait for more articles on this topic! Seriously...do you think you could post a more advanced article on creating a restful zend framework application? Or a link to one? It's been a few months since this post and I'm anxious to learn more!

Hi,

When are you going to release your next post on managing API keys etc?

I would really like to know as I cannot find anything on the net currently.

Cheers.

Ian

Hello Sudheer,

First of all, thanks for the excellent article.

Do you think you can provide the full code of the above example as a zip file?

Subra

Thanks for the article. It helped me a lot.
I noticed I was getting all my layout html returned with the response also, so I disable it in the init() function like this: $this->_helper->layout->disableLayout();
We are only supposed to return response codes anyway right?
Correct me if I'm wrong.

I am currently struggling with Zend_Rest_* to achieve the following Rest routes:

http://example.org/users/123/items/456

I need a Rest route for the user resource: /users/:id
This can be done just like in your example

But I also need a Rest route for the item resource of a given user
/user/:id/items/:itemid

And I can't figure it out. Do you know how to set up routes for that?

Hello Sudheer,

I followed the quickstart tutorials and also ur tutorial here. This is how my http.conf file looks:

DocumentRoot "C:\Documents and Settings\aswats\My Documents\MyProjects"
.
.
.
<Directory "C:\Documents and Settings\aswats\My Documents\MyProjects">
    #
    # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
    # or any combination of:
    #   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    #
    # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
    # doesn't give it to you.
    #
    # The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see
    # <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options<br />
" title="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options<br />
">http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options<br />
</a>    # for more information.
    #
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
 
    #
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
    # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
    #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    #
    AllowOverride None
 
    #
    # Controls who can get stuff from this server.
    #
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

In my httpd-vhosts.conf file I have added the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.local
    DocumentRoot /askaway/public
 
    SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV "development"
 
    <Directory /askaway/public>
        DirectoryIndex index.php
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I also changed the hosts file to include

127.0.0.1 example.local

I followed your instructions step by step. But when I point my browser to http://example.local/article, i get the following error:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /article on this server.

Could please tell me what am I doing wrong here?

Hi,
Next step will be building custom rest router (perhaps extending the one that exists in ZF) cause current implementation of REST Router is useless.
It doesn't support any arbitrary urls.
Cheers

instruction to help newbe (as me :) )

generate zend application:

zf.sh create project /path/to/the/project/project_name

change Bootstrap.php as follow:

thx for brilliant introduction!

Please can anyone mention the step by step procedure for this... i tried the above steps:
First i changed my bootstrap.php file, and added a controller, with some action methods.

When i invoked ..... my application/article/1
i didn't get the expected output, rather i got some error saying:
File not found..
Message: Action "article" does not exist and was not trapped in __call()

Please help....Do i need to create any vieww or models ?

If anyone would like to set it in their ini configuration file. Do the following:

UsersConroller

resources.router.routes.rest.type = "Zend_Rest_Route"
resources.router.routes.rest.defaults.controller = object
resources.router.routes.rest.defaults.mod = users

or more than one controller
UsersController and LeadsController

resources.router.routes.rest.type = "Zend_Rest_Route"
resources.router.routes.rest.defaults.controller = object
resources.router.routes.rest.defaults.mod = users, leads

A Marvel on the web my friend.!! Thanks a ton for such a descriptive guide on zend rest application development. God bless you!!

Nice article, appreciate your help

Looking forward to your post on "Chaining custom routes" for REST URIs

HI I am new to zend,
when i added
protected function _initRestRoute() {
$this->bootstrap('frontController');
$frontController = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$restRoute = new Zend_Rest_Route($frontController);
$frontController->getRouter()->addRoute('default', $restRoute);

these lines to my bootstrap file, every action in other controllers are not working , all actions are mapped to getAction. so getting an error like "Action "get" does not exist and was not trapped in __call() " , the rest part is working fine.

How i can consume this with zend framework?

It's not clear to me where to put

protected function _initRestRoute

Could you clarify? I'm really new to Zend Framework, so please be very verbose and explain anything you think may be necessary.

Tom

Hello,

I kept getting an Error 500. I followed every step of this tutorial multiple times but ended up with a 500 every time. I checked out the Zend_Rest_Controller class and turns out that there is another abstract function missing in this tutorial. For anyone experiencing the same problem, add
public function headAction(){}
to your controller.

Cheers!