Tag: apis

I'm working with a bunch of OpenAPI specs now I am working for Nexmo and so far I'm loving working with API descriptions. OpenAPI is the next iteration of what used to be called "Swagger", a machine-readable way to describe your API and from that description create docs, code libraries, tests, and all sorts. Today's post is a quick writeup of how I generated some PHP code so that I can refer back to this next time I want to do it!

I work extensively with APIs and a variety of serverside scripting languages, and best practice does change over time. Many of the most popular posts on this blog are 10 years old, because apparently I was interesting in 2008. Two in particular from around that time relate to making POST requests from PHP ... and I'd do it completely differently today. So, in an attempt to overcome some of the past crimes of the Internet in general and PHP in particular: here's how to make a POST request in PHP, today, in a PHP 7+ world (it probably works in PHP 5 too).

Having managed to avoid YAML until quite recently, my vim installation wasn't well set up at all for working with it. It needs more config settings than plugins, so I thought I'd write down what I found helpful. I'm using it quite a lot now I'm working with OAS (used to be Swagger) API definitions.

I've shipped a handful of greenfield APIs in recent months for different clients, and in each case I've been building the documentation before the API. I hadn't really recognised it as a pattern until someone else commented on it, but I do find this approach has worked well for my projects, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on this in a bit more detail.

Recently I was hastily building an API for a client and I wanted to run some tests against it. I've written before about using Runscope for API testing, but this was against a local dev platform (inside a VM, not directly on my laptop) rather than a public API. The same problem arises if you want to access a local site or API from elsewhere or from a mobile device. In all these scenarios, ngrok is your friend.

I have just introduced Beanstalkd into my current PHP project; it was super-easy so I thought I'd share some examples and my thoughts on how a job queue fits in with a PHP web application.