On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 2:41 PM, Eric Chadbourne <eric.chadbou...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > I've written a little web application and a friend of mine has asked for an > api. I don't know much about this subject though rest looks understandable. > Any suggestions for something to read? All clues welcome.
REST should be fine. I may be old school, but I personally would consider implementing a REST API to be "making it fancy". When I write one-off web apps and I want to add an API, I just publicly expose some of the functionality (with proper security measures in place, of course) via a page that expects a POST and which returns some formatted text. For example if I want an API for a personal finance "app" (fancy word for a mish-mash of scripts) I might have the following "API calls" (really just web pages that are more programmer-friendly): - login.php: post credentials to this to get authenticated - transaction.php: you can POST to this with a couple of fields that define the transaction amount, a short description and optionally a category. It prints out a simple success or failure message. - balance.php: GET only, returns your current balance as an integer in text form If I'm already using these filenames for the "normal" UI then I might prepend them with api_. -Dan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss