What this book covers

Chapter 1, RESTful Web Services, Introduction and Motivation, introduces you to web services, REST architecture, the RESTful web services, and its comparison to other web services such as HTTP verbs and RESTful endpoints. It also explains web services through the example of a blog and then talk about the response format and response code.

Chapter 2, PHP7, To Code It Better, includes new features and changes in PHP7 that we will either use in this book or are very important and worth discussing.

Chapter 3, Creating RESTful Endpoints, is about creating REST API endpoints for CRUD operations of a blog post in Vanilla PHP. It also explains the manual way of testing API endpoints through a REST client named Postman.

Chapter 4, Reviewing Design Flaws and Security Threats, reviews what we have built in the preceding chapter and highlights the problems and flaws in it so that we can improvise later.

Chapter 5, Load and Resolve with Composer, an Evolutionary, is about an evolutionary tool in the PHP ecosystem: composer. This is not just an autoloader or package installer, but a dependency manager. So, you will learn about composer in this chapter.

Chapter 6, Illuminating RESTful Web Services with Lumen, introduces you to a micro-framework named Lumen, in which we will rewrite our RESTful web services endpoints and review how this tool will significantly improve our speed and application structure.

Chapter 7, Improving RESTful Web Services, equips us to improve what we did in the preceding chapter; you will learn how to improve RESTful web services. We will create authentication and make a Transformer to separate how JSON structure should look. Also, we will improve in terms of security and learn about SSL.

Chapter 8, API Testing – Guards on the Gates, introduces the need of automated tests. Will introduce different type of tests and then focus on API testing. We will then cover an automated testing framework named CodeCeption and write API tests in it.

Chapter 9, Microservices, is about the microservices architecture. We will understand the benefits and challenges of microservices and look into some of possible solutions and trade-offs.