Question

I’m implementing a REST service in php.

q1. Can I split the controller and resource?

http://myserver/myCtrl.php?res=/items/1

q2. if not, is the standard specs (if any exists) for rewrites on iis, apache, nginx etc to survive the http-verb over the rewrite?

If not, how to solve?

Answer 1

For APIs (I have a framework for such) I tend to have a URL structure that looks as follows:

http://domain.com/api/%5Bresource]/[id]/[subresource]

I pass all requests to a front controller with a .htaccess file that parses incoming requests and passes the request off to the relavant controller. So my index.php looks similar to the following at the very simplest:

<?php

$request = explode('/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/'));

$resource_name = ucfirst($request[0]).'Controller';
$http_verb = strtolower($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']);

$controller = new $resource_name;

$response = call_user_func_array(array($controller, $http_verb), array($request));

header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo json_encode($response);

So if you call http://domain.com/api/news, then it will attempt to instantiate a class called NewsController, and if it’s a GET request then the get() method of that class, or post() for a POST request, and so on. The response of that call is then returned to the client as JSON.

Hopefully that should be enough to get you started.