New Website
When I posted my article on creating a RESTful SOA it occurred to me that my own website was badly abusing every architectural direction that I was advocating. I decided to put my architecture to the test by creating a RESTful SOA for my own website. While I’ve recently applied the RESTful SOA to enterprise web applications I’ve never applied it to something so small.
So, I created a FrontController, ResourceLookup, and a full MVC utilizing a RESTful SOA written entirely in PHP and all for this one site! I even decided to keep the code backwards compatible with PHP4, so I didn’t get to use the cool reflection capability in PHP5, but I wanted to prove that I can still apply proper SOA fundamentals to PHP4.
I kept things simple and even managed to remove all dependencies to MySQL (which my previous site utilized). I only have three types of resources so it was relatively easy coding.
The end result: everything you’re seeing here can be represented as a web page, or as a service to be manipulated using HTTP methods, or as a news feed. I also added a text representation, which doesn’t serve much of a point except for demonstration.
The framework only took me a few hours to create, which was great, as it proves that a RESTful SOA is a flexible architecture that applies to web applications small and large. The problem was, I spent an entire weekend editing stylesheets, creating a new look and feel, and basically redesigning the entire site! That last part took longer than I wanted, and I’ve still got some bugs to work out.