nemetral.net | Insightful posts on design and code
MVC is certainly the widest spread architectural pattern in today's webdevelopment landscape. Brought back to fashion by Ruby on Rails from 2004 on, it has been translated and implemented into many languages and more than 100 web frameworks. This illustrated three-part is aimed at helping you cross the gap between a traditionnal vanilla PHP script and a full MVC implementation.
Three different designs in a couple of months, that's a lot of CSS written! Well here it is: the third and (hopefully) final design of nemetral.net. Several reasons behind this redesign: the need to focus on content rather than presentation (hence the "popular posts" sidebar box, the tag cloud etc.) and the need to improve readability.
Already the seventh post of series "The pursuit of APIness", and it is now time to conclude by outlining another strategic issue substantially bound to APIs: local expertises. As a matter of fact, since the very goal of an API is to cross the line of existing web property (i.e. a website, a database) and open monitored accesses to data, releasing an API can make other websites orbitting in nearby niches use your API, i.e. use your data, i.e. transform your data into the local reference.
The first five posts of series "The Pursuit of APIness" went through technical examples of how APIs actually work, from an illustration of how to hack a web form with a PHP script to how to design and program an API using custom XML, or following the REST principles, or using XML-RPC or SOAP. It is now time to wrap up everything we've learnt about web APIs and to understand why they're so strategic.
XML-RPC is damn easy to use and many projects still rely on it. But for a few years a new protocol has emerged: SOAP. SOAP is traditionally considered as an evolution of XML-RPC. Selected by Google for its famous Search API (now deprecated), the SOAP protocol is usually considered as more complex than plain XML-RPC messaging. In fact, if you understood XML-RPC, then you should have no difficulty to understand SOAP as well, the latter being mainly an abstraction of XML-RPC.
Last week we reviewed the principles behind a RESTful architecture. This week, as part 4 of this series dedicated to web APIs, we will focus on XML-RPC which, contrary to REST, is not a set of general principles but a substantial specification on how to format XML messages carried over HTTP.
Nemetral is a freelance webdeveloper with 8+ years experience in the industry. On nemetral.net you will find insightful posts on design and code, tackling various topics related to webdevelopment from a highly educational perspective.
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