pocket-knife

pocket-knife is a RESTful, PHP web service framework. It takes care of the plumbing while you focus on building RESTful resources (the data schema and actions) and representations (the data format); of course pocket-knife already includes common representation types like JSON, XML, HTML as well as a handful of storage methods like PDO, CouchDB, and Mongo to link your resources to a database.

Example

Because it is RESTful, it is simple to understand at a glance:

pocket-knife links this http://example.com/api.php/thing/1 (allowing GET, PUT, POST, DELETE actions) to this:

<?php
// build a Resource; this uses the Item pattern, which assumes it is in a list
class Thing extends ResourceItem {
    public $property_a;
    public $property_b;
    protected $storage = array('type' => 'pdo', 'location' => 'localhost', 
        'database' => 'example', 'username' => 'test', 'password' => 'test',
        'table' => 'things', 'primary' => 'id'); // 'primary' == primary key
}

The key to making this happen is a file like this one, api.php:

<?php
require 'path/to/pocket-knife/files/.../start.php';
require 'path/to/resource/.../Thing.php';

// build settings, not much needed here; can be loaded from a JSON or PHP file
$settings = new Settings();
$settings->set('acl', true); // allow all types of requests for this example
$settings->set('representations', array('text/html', 'application/json', 
    'application/xml')); // allow only these representation types

// start web service
$service = new Service($settings);
$service->execute();

Demo

For a working demo:

1. Download the ZIP
2. Extract it in your Apache public directory
3. Visit http://yoursite.com/pocket-knife/www

Documentation

A lot more goes on behind the scenes, but that was the simple start-up guide; for more detail see the in-progress [documentation] (https://github.com/andrewsbrown/pocket-knife/wiki). There you can learn about features like:

• Resource patterns
• Authentication and finely-granular ACLs
• OAuth Authentication
• Caching
• HTTP Content-Type detection
• Storage methods
• Testing
• Auto-updates

Issues

Please post all issues to the [issues] (https://github.com/andrewsbrown/pocket-knife/issues) page. The project is small enough at this stage that I can respond and fix anything you may find rather quickly.