Finally, some substantial progress. First thing I did today was to figure out a concrete way of developing a REST web service in PHP. Turns out that the $_SERVER global variable has all that I need to respond to HTTP GET/POST etc. requests. PHP even has a nifty function called apache_request_headers() to get all this stuff. After that, it’s merely a question of processing the request and echoing back a response. headers() is what will help in sending back the proper response codes and HTTP headers.

So this is how it’s going to work. You make a POST request to, say http://docs.gentoo.org/repodoc/validate with the XML document to be validated attached to the request, and you receive a 201 (Resource Created) response code, with a location such as http://docs.gentoo.org/repodoc/result/<someID>. Next, the client makes a GET request to that location, which will send you back an XML file with details on the validation; whether it was successful or not, and if it wasn’t, what the problems were.I’m kind of deviating from the actual REST specification a bit, the location returned by the response to a POST request should really be the URI of the resource created, which in our case is the XML file to be validated. But what I’m doing instead is to create the result of the validation at that URI. The original XML file will actually not be stored permanently on the server. And neither will the results, so the URI returned with the 201 code is not persistent. This is sort of tricky, we need to decide on the amount of time that the result will stay. I was thinking of a daily cron job that cleans up the results, but we’ll need a debate on that.

So that’s just two resources, the validate resource responds to POST requests, and the result resource responds to the GET requests. As simple as it can get. The only XML that the server sends back is the result file, the Schema for which I’m currently authoring. Which would help people interested in writing a client for the repodoc web service, although I’ll be writing a reference client’ once the web service is up and running.

Phew! Surprisingly, there isn’t much information available on the internet on how to build a REST service in PHP. Making a nice tutorial and putting it up on xml.com or something would be a philanthrophic thing to do!