php - How to write a REST API?

Question

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I have done some web programming before, back when everyone were using MySQL and PHP, so my skills are a bit outdated, but I'm confident that I would be able to pull it of using the techniques I already know.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.

Answer 1

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

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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.

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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.