Professional Web APIs with PHP

With the growing popularity of the Internet, not merely as a research tool or toy, but as a bona fide business communication tool, groups are finding new ways to communicate with each other. Initially (mirroring the vendor-based communication protocols that ran rampant before standardized open protocols were introduced) they communicated via proprietary closed protocols. Fortunately, technologies like XML feeds and broader web services are allowing communication frameworks to be built faster, and allowing more groups to participate.

In this book, feeds are introduced first. These XML documents are used to pass information off from one party to others. These feeds are frequently used by news sites (both professional and amateur) to pass off their stories to interested third parties. Feeds are frequently used to mirror content available on the general website. By providing this same information in a convenient XML format, users are able to easily integrate it into their own site without resorting to cumbersome (and often unreliable) scraping techniques. Both aspects of feeds are discussed—producing the feeds to provide your users with your content in an easy-to-use format, and consuming those feeds to present external content to your users.

Second, APIs are introduced. Whereas feeds provide the same document to all requestors, the response an API provides is very dependent on the requestor and the specifics of the request. Allowing the user to request specific information opens a whole new world of opportunities, where detailed information can be requested on anything the server offers, or frequently, to push information to the server itself. APIs often allow users to connect to the server via a secure channel, which allows confidential transfers such as money transfers or bidding on auctions. A series of existing APIs are presented, complete with working code.

Although these topics are nothing new to the bookseller's shelf, I have often been frustrated with the common approach of exploring a single problem in a variety of languages. As a PHP programmer, I read the PHP sections and skip the rest. This leaves me paying for a whole book, but only reading a quarter of it. While you may have bought this book with a specific API or project in mind, my hope is that by covering a variety of things in a single language, you will not only find a more detailed coverage of that specific topic, but will also find other topics of interest, which you can hopefully use later.


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