I finished reading Samisa’s recently published Restful PHP Web services book. Normally when it comes to technical books I don’t read every bit of it. My understanding is it is not necessary to do so. Because you have the book you can always refer to it whenever necessary. However my initial reading aim at fulfilling one task. That’s to understand how to use the book quickly when need arise. It’s kind of indexing the book in memory for faster reference later. Also interesting bits that attract me most will be covered withing this initial iteration of reading.
But with this book I read it from start to end without missing a single word of it. It is so compact, so easy to read. One reason for this change is my curiosity about the content of the book. That curiosity is aroused by several reasons. For one thing I often hear the technical jargons contained in the book within the office environment I live. My colleges at WSO2 developed WSF/PHP which support RESTful as well as SOAP web services in the same stack. This WSF/PHP use WSF/C as it’s web services core on which development team I’m a developer at WSO2. For some time I wanted to know what they do in these PHP web services stuff but could not find time/desire/way to do it fast. This book provided me all that.
Second I share the belief with many that WSF/PHP and the rest of the scripting web services stacks like WSF/Ruby, WSF/Python from WSO2 have big potential within the web services market in near future. So gaining knowledge in those areas is always a good thing to do.
Chapter 6 nicely explained the use of MVC architecture in Zend framework for supporting restful web services with step by step easy to understand examples.
In addition to explaining the facts related to the subject matter Samisa has nicely used his knowledge on Software development which he gathered through experience as a developer as well as through years of teaching at the University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka. Throughout the book he explains best practices and how to avoid pitfalls(especially in chapter 7) which are useful hints for any developer.
There are extensive code samples which could be a + point and at the same time – point depending the reader. However even a non-php programmer could easily understand those code excerpts without much effort(I could and I’m not a PHP programmer he he)
I wish if there was a section comparing positive and negative aspects of REST and SOAP web service approaches. May be an design approach which could take best from both worlds(I don’t know).
