Ben Ramsey

When I was contacted by a representative of Packt Publishing to review RESTful PHP Web Services by Samisa Abeysinghe, I was naturally interested. After all, I’ve written and spoken a lot about representational state transfer (REST). But I was also skeptical because plenty of people these days talk about RESTful web services, but they don’t really explain REST.

Abeysinghe approaches the topic from a very practical level. From the very first chapter to the last, RESTful PHP is chock full of code samples and discussion of tools to access and build RESTful services. The problem, though, as Lorna Mitchell points out, is that “[v]ery few services that claim to be RESTful actually are, which makes writing anything along these lines very tricky.” I agree. I would have liked to have seen a more critical look at the so-called RESTful services profiled in the book, with the author explaining the principles of REST by showing how the services examined are or are not RESTful.

In addition, the book devotes very little space to actually describing the principles of the REST architectural style. Instead, there is only a small section in the first chapter that lists some of the principles of REST in a bullet list. I say “some,” because the book fails to mention the principles of client-server, caching, layering, and code-on-demand. Of particular importance to me are the principles of caching and layering because I think these make for the most compelling arguments for using the REST style. Later, when the book tries to make a case for the need for RESTful web services, it talks only about the need for web services and why PHP programmers need to know how to consume REST services, rather than actually explaining why REST itself is important.

While my criticism of the author’s lack of focus on defining and explaining REST is harsh, I will return again to my point about the practically of the book’s examples. It is filled to the brim with working code examples that show how to consume Flickr, BBC News, Yahoo Maps, and other web services, and he discusses many tools to use as HTTP clients in PHP, from curl to Zend_Rest_Client. He also goes into much detail explaining how to design and implement RESTful web services, using a fictional library service as an example. In truth, the real focus on the book isn’t on REST but on the resource-oriented architecture, and to that end, he does offer some good discussion, even covering such topics important to the community as PUT vs. POST and URL design, nuances of design that REST does not cover. And, at the end of the day, what is really more important to a programmer who needs to quickly consume web services for a project: pragmatism or theoretical discussion? My bet is on pragmatism, and this book offers plenty of it.

So, if you’re looking for a full-fledged definition of representational state transfer, this book is not for you. Read Roy Fielding’s dissertation, if you want that. However, if what you’re looking for is a practical approach to consuming resource-oriented web services, then RESTful PHP Web Services is what you’re looking for.