Working with RESTful Services in CodeIgniter

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/working-with-restful-services-in-codeigniter-2/

CodeIgniter is becoming well known for its power as a PHP based web application framework, but it’s not often that we see examples of it being used for anything else. Today we’ll learn how we can use CodeIgniter to create a RESTful API for your existing web applications, and demonstrate how to interact with your own API or other RESTful web-services, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Tutorial Details

• Program: CodeIgniter, CodeIgniter REST server and CodeIgniter REST client
• Difficulty: Medium
• Estimated Completion Time: 30 minutes

Introduction

If you have been following the CodeIgniter From Scratch series you will know by now that it is relatively quick and easy to put together simple web applications, such as blogs, CMS systems, brochure sites, etc. One thing you may not have thought about is using CodeIgniter to create an interactive API. After trying several existing REST implementations, I found they not only lacked simplicity but were missing most of the features you would expect from a RESTful implementation; so I built my own. This tutorial will show you how to use this code to set up your REST API, and gives example of how to interact with it from your web application.

Assumptions

1. You have a web server set up, locally or online and known how to manage files on it.
2. You have read a few of the CodeIgniter from Scratch tutorials.
3. You know how to set up CodeIgniter.
4. You know a little about RESTful services.

This tutorial is broken down into two parts. We will start by learning how to create a RESTful service, then further down, we will learn how to interact with it in a few different ways.

Part 1