Getting started with REST using Zend Framework

Creating a REST server in ZendFramework can be simple as 3 lines of code. For the sake of simplicity, let’s suppose we’ll place all of our code logic in one file, the IndexController.php. The basic building block of each and every Zend Framework application. Code for creating a REST server looks like

public function restAction()
{
$server = new Zend_Rest_Server();
$server->setClass(‘CustomTestClass’);
$server->handle();
exit;
}

Notice the CustomTestClass? This is the name of the class we wish to make availabe trough REST server. For the sake of simplicity, this class is placed in same file as our IndexController class. Below is the sample of class body

class CustomTestClass
{
/**
* Write to a file
*
* @param string $string
* @return string Some return message
*/
public function sayHello($name)
{
$message = ‘Hello ‘.$name;
return $message;
}
}

Now all that’s left is to make a call to our REST server using GET method. Since our REST server code is placed inside restAction function in IndexController, it can be accessed using url like

http://localhost/myzendapp/index.php/index/rest

And the result should look like

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

No Method Specified.

failed

Although these are error messages, it’s ok, it means our REST server is working. Now if we were to enter url like

http://localhost/myzendapp/index.php/index/rest?method=sayHello

we would get response error message like
< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

Invalid Method Call to sayHello. Requires 1, 0 given.

failed
This too is ok. It simply means we omited the parametars we were supose to pass to function. Remember, our sayHello function has signature like

public function sayHello($name)

meaning we should pass it a parametar $name. Now if we were to type into our browser url like

http://localhost/myzendapp/index.php/index/rest?method=sayHello&name=Branko

We would get response like

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

Hello Branko
success
copied