Scrawler Router and RESTful routing

Published Jan 10, 2019

What is a RESTful Router ?

The basic premise is, instead of relying exclusively on the URL to indicate what webpage you want to go to (and just using the one method), it's a combination of VERB and URL.This way, the same URL, when used with a different verb (such as GET, PUT, POST, DELETE), will get you to a different page. This makes for cleaner, shorter URLs, and is particularly adapted to CRUD applications, which most web apps are.

According to wikipedia :

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, termed RESTful web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. RESTful web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of web services, such as SOAP web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.[1]

Presenting Scrawler Router (an automatic restful router for PHP):

This is an library for automatic restful routing, you do not have to define a single route, it automatically detects the url and calls the corresponding controller. Automatic routing is made possible by following some conventions.

Why Scrawler Router?

This is an library for automatic restful routing, you do not have to define a single route, it automatically detects the url and calls the corresponding controller.
Automatic routing is made possible by following some conventions.

Installation

Using Composer

composer require scrawler/router

Getting Started

In your index.php

<?php

use Scrawler\Router\RouteCollection;
use Scrawler\Router\Router;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;


$dir = /path/to/your/controllers;
$namespace = Namespace\of\your\controllers;

$router = new Router(new RouteCollection($dir,$namespace));
//Optional you can now pass your own Request object to Router for Router to work on
//$router = new Router(new RouteCollection($dir,$namespace),Request $request);


//Dispatch route and get back the response
$response = $router->dispatch();

//Do anything with your Response object here
//Probably middleware can hook in here

//send response
$response->send();

Done now whatever request occurs it will be automatically routed . You don't have define a single route

How it Works?

The automatic routing is possible by following some conventions. Lets take a example lets say a controller Hello

<?php
//Hello.php

class Hello{

public function getWorld(){
return "Hello World";
}

}

now calling localhost/hello/world from your browser you will see hello world on your screen.

How does it do it automatically?

Each request to the server is interpreted by ghost route in following way:

METHOD /controller/function/arguments1/arguments2

The controller and function that would be invoked will be

<?php

class controller{

public function methodFunction(arguments1,arguments2){
//Definition goes here
}

}

For Example the following call:

GET /user/find/1

would invoke following controller and method

<?php

class User{

public function getFind($id){
//Function definition goes here
}
}

In above example 1 will be passed as argument $id

How should I name my function for automatic routing?

The function name in the controller should be named according to following convention:
methodFunctionname
Note:The method should always be written in small and the first word of function name should always start with capital.
Method is the method used while calling url. Valid methods are:

all - maps any kind of request method i.e it can be get,post etc
get - mpas url called by GET method
post - maps url called by POST method
put - maps url called by PUT method
delete - maps url called by DELETE method

Some eg. of valid function names are:
getArticles, postUser, putResource
Invalid function names are:
GETarticles, Postuser, PutResource

Server Configuration

Apache

You may need to add the following snippet in your Apache HTTP server virtual host configuration or .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]