Core in Drupal 8 comes with a built-in solution for providing creating a REST API without writing a single line of code.
NOTE: We now have a full series on Web Services in Drupal that goes into much more detail about building your API for a decoupled site.
In this lesson we will talk about the core modules that help create a REST API, including:
- REST module
- Serializer
- HAL
- Basic Authentication
- and the RESTUI contributed module
Self-check question: Can you find examples in Drupal core of plugins that expose data to the REST server?
Notes:
- The video covers creating a node (via POST) twice, using two different versions of the Postman Chrome extension.
- The REST_UI module has been updated since the creation of this video. Rather than providing unique permissions for users it now leverages entity permissions to determine if a user has access to a particular operation or not.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I'll introduce the API Blueprint specification and take a look at a few tools we can use to provide documentation and testing for our API.
The tools we'll look at include:
By the end of the tutorial you'll have a better understanding of the API Blueprint specification and be able to use Dredd and Aglio to ensure your API documentation and testing stay up-to-date.
Self-check question: Could you write a script that could be run after every commit that would keep your documentation up-to-date, and provide API test results?
Additional resources
Object-Oriented PHP Part 3
CourseIn this series, we’ll continue to build the spaceship app that we’ve started in Introduction to Object-Oriented PHP and Object-Oriented PHP Part 2. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the extends
keyword in PHP so that you can use it to inherit properties and methods from another class
.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I will show you how to override a method that you’ve inherited from another class. By having two classes we are starting to shape the different behaviors and properties of each, while still keeping most things in common and not duplicated.
In this tutorial, I will show you the difference between public, private, and protected methods or properties in PHP classes. By the end of this lesson you will learn how to make things private at first, protected once you need to access them in a subclass, and public when you need to use it outside of its class and subclass.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I will show you how to get around the problem of calling a function that you have overridden in your class: how to call the parent class method.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I will show you how we can build a better blueprint and hierarchical structure for our app’s classes through the use of abstract classes.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I will show you the power of abstract classes and how you can enforce subclasses to define certain functions. In this way, you can share logic but for things that are really specific to subclasses, you can force them to define certain functions, but with the specific logic required.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I will show you how to extend an abstract class and ensure that all the methods that are required by the abstract class are included in this new class.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I will show you how to handle new requirements for data storage by creating two smaller abstract classes out of our original data storage class. By creating these new abstract classes, we can build more flexibility into our code.
Additional resources
Now that we have created new abstract classes, we need to load and utilize them in our code. In this tutorial, I will show you how we can refactor our code to make use of our new abstract data loading classes.
We have an abstract class with methods that we require, but there’s no logic in these abstract methods. This is a perfect opportunity to use interfaces. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create and implement Interfaces. I will also explain how interfaces are useful when you will be sharing your code. But even if you’re not creating interfaces to share, chances are, if you’re using open source code — and definitely in Drupal — you will need to know how to implement interfaces.