I am a beginner with PHP but I know most of the basics. I currently have an API for my website, coded myself, of which I can call different methods with different parameters and they will scour my databases for the relevant information.
However I want to convert it to REST.
So instead of having requests like this http://mywebsite.com/api/?param=allPosts I would have something like http://mywebsite.com/api/posts/. I would do this for each of my 23 different params.
How could I do this?
One way would be to use a micro framework for routing. This would 'point' url request patterns to relevant php files (controllers) to manage those requests and serve content (or perform CRUD operations, or whatever it is your API does).
There's a good post here with some discussion and further links.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/115629/simplest-php-routing-framework
I'm currently in the process of using the framework Silex for this exact purpose
It may be that you wish to convert your PHP application to use one of the many frameworks out there (which will handle routing amongst other things).
The usual suspects are
and there are many more...
This is not strictly speaking RESTful that is just prettifying your URL's.
To "Prettify" your URL's you could implement something like this:
?param=allPostsRESTful routing is based around the idea of using the different HTTP verbs (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE) to decide what actions to take on your resources on the server. Wikipedia has a good overview.
One way would be to use apache's mod_rewrite to effectively convert the second type of request to the first. It's not necessarily ideal, but it's a pretty straightforward solution to your problem.
