Summary

In this chapter, we understood what a RESTful web service is. We looked at constraints that should be fulfilled to be called as a RESTful web service. Then we understood that REST is an architecture and it is a way to build stuff and it favors convention over configuration. We looked at HTTP verbs (methods) and looked at URL conventions. We understood that these are just conventions. HTTP verbs and URLs are used in RESTful web services; otherwise it is always up to the developer to provide the expected behavior as REST has conventions which are just considered as standard but it don't provide any implementation.

In this chapter, we didn't talk about the implementation of RESTful web services. We just considered a case study of a typical blog and took examples of two resources of the blog and defined their endpoints with the expected responses. We also looked at HTTP response code but we didn't write actual code to implement these RESTful web services. We defined these endpoints, so we will see their implementation in the next chapters.

As this book is about building RESTful web services in the PHP7, in next chapter we will look at the features that came in PHP7. PHP7 does not offer anything specific to RESTful web services but we will be utilizing some of the new features in PHP7 to write better and clean code to build RESTful web services.

If you already know PHP7 well and don't wish to dig into that at the moment, you can skip Chapter 2, PHP7, To Code It Better, and start Chapter 3, Creating RESTful Endpoints, where we will build RESTful web services.