Rest4 : Rest Full of Rest Framework

Rest4 is a PHP framework meant to build resource oriented architectures. It's under GNU/GPL v2 licence. More informations on Rest4.org.

Development config

Clone the project in a folder containing current development files:

    mkdir /var/www/publicproject
    git clone git@github.com:nfroidure/Rest4.git

Then, create a folder to contain your own datas and configuration files

    mkdir /var/www/owndatas
    mkdir /var/www/owndatas/www
    mkdir /var/www/owndatas/log
    echo "<?php
    require 'restfor.php';" > /var/www/owndatas/www/index.php

The vhost to be created is the same than for production except that you can use a .htaccess file and the fact that you'll have to add one more directory to the open_basedir and include_path directories.

To get you started, here is a repo with a common dev config.

Production config

Rest4 has currently no stable version, use it at your own risk ! Many APIs may change in the near future except those specified as stable in the documentation.

To use Rest4 for production, copy the Rest4 sources to a folder. By example:

    mkdir /var/www/rest4
    cd /var/www/rest4
    wget https://github.com/nfroidure/Rest4/archive/master.zip
    tar -xvzf rest4.tar.gz .
    rm rest4.tar.gz

You can use it's newly created folder or use your own folder for your site:

    mkdir /var/www/website
    mkdir /var/www/website/www
    mkdir /var/www/website/log
    echo "<?php
    require 'restfor.php';" > /var/www/website/www/index.php

Finally, create a vhost like this one:

    <VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName app.example.com
        ServerAlias app.example.fr

        DocumentRoot /var/www/webapp/www/

        CustomLog /var/www/webapp/log/access.log combined
    </VirtualHost>

    <Directory "/var/www/webapp/www/">
        <IfModule mod_php5.c>
                php_admin_value open_basedir "/tmp/:/var/www/rest4/:/var/www/webapp/"
                php_admin_value include_path "/var/www/webapp/www/:/var/www/rest4/www/"
        </IfModule>
        AllowOverride None
        Options FollowSymLinks
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        RewriteEngine on
        # HOST is always the server name
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^app.example.com$
        RewriteRule (.*) http://app.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
        # Rest4 rewrite rules
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [L]
    </Directory>

Note: Rest4 requires URL Rewriting to be activated.

Note 2: You can take a look at index.php to view constants you can define to debug efficiently.

Note 3: Rest4 is not intended to be used on a low cost hosting service. The fact is that we made design choices to make it fast on servers with RAM caching systems (xcache, apc, memcached) and OPCode cachers (especially for the db driver).

More performances

We strongly recommend the use of xcache with Rest4 since it is the only fully supported cache system. Feel free to maintain your own, apc is very close to be usable.

In addition to xcache, you could tell Apache to serve static files himself by adding those lines in place of the Rest4 rewrite rules :

    # Static rewrite rules
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(HEAD|GET)$
    RewriteRule ^fs/public/(.+)\.([0-9a-z]+)$ /public/$1.$2 [L]
    # Rest rewrite rules
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/public/ [or]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^(HEAD|GET)$
    RewriteRule (.*) index.php [L]

You may want to prevent PHP filling the $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE arrays since Rest4 doesn't use them:

variables_order=ES
request_order=ES

Since the db driver automagically reads the tables foreign keys/column types, the following setting is very important to keep good performances even with an empty server cache:

innodb_stats_on_metadata=0;

Working code

The Rest4.org website is made with Rest4, may take a quick look to the following project to understand how it work : https://github.com/nfroidure/Rest4.org

Unit testing

I'm not a unit test fan, so i decided to test Rest4 code at the resource level. It's less test, but keeps code strong. It test REST behavior, instead of each line of code. To test, use the unit driver : http://app.example.com/unit.dat?verbose=(yes|no)&multiple=(yes|no) Verbose means you get informations, even if the test pass. Multiple executes tests for each test found in the ini_path (no: yours, yes: yours & mine). Many tests will fail if you didn't set associated libraries or privileges (db: set root privileges, feed: download simplepie).

Documentation

Each Rest4 copy comes with it's own documentation. Go to : http://app.example.com/doc

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Rest4 / Rest4-php

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