I introduced ASP.NET
Web API in some of my previous posts. Although
Web API is easy to use in ASP.NET
web applications you can use
Web API also from other platforms. This post shows you how to consume ASP.NET
Web API from PHP scripts. Here are my previous posts about
Web API: How content negotiation works? ASP.NET
Web API: Extending content negotiation with new formats Query string
based content formatting Although these posts cover content negotiation they give you some idea about how
Web API works. Test application On
Web API side I use the same sample application as in previous
Web API posts – very primitive
web application to manage contacts. Listing contacts On the other machine I will run the following PHP script that works against my
Web API application: <?php // request list of contacts from
Web API $json = file_get_contents('http://vs2010dev:3613/api/contacts/'); // deserialize data from JSON $contacts = json_decode($json); ?> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> </head> <body> <table> <?php foreach($contacts as $contact) { ?> <tr> <td valign="top"> <?php echo $contact->FirstName ?> </td> <td valign="top"> <?php echo $contact->LastName ?> </td> <td valign="middle"> <form method="POST"> <input type="hidden" name="id" value="<?php echo $contact-/>Id ?>" /> <input type="submit" name="cmd" value="Delete"/> </form> </td> </tr> <?php } ?> </table> </body> </html> Notice how easy it is to handle JSON data in PHP! My PHP script produces the following output: Looks like data is here as it should be. Deleting contacts Now let’s write code to delete contacts. Add this block of code before any other code in PHP script. if(@$_POST['cmd'] == 'Delete') { $errno = 0; $errstr = ''; $id = @$_POST['id']; $params = array('http' => array( 'method' => 'DELETE', 'content' => "" )); $url = 'http://vs2010dev:3613/api/contacts/'.$id; $ctx = stream_context_create($params); $fp = fopen($url, 'rb', false, $ctx); if (!$fp) { $res = false; } else { $res = stream_get_contents($fp); } fclose($fp); header('Location: /json.php'); exit; } Again simple code. If we write also insert and update methods we may want to bundle those operations to single class. Conclusion ASP.NET
Web API is not only ASP.NET fun. It is available also for all other platforms. In this posting we wrote simple PHP client that is able to communicate with our
Web API application. We wrote only some simple code, nothing complex. Same way we can use also platforms like Java, PERL and Ruby.
