In previous
articles,
I've explored building service endpoints and RESTful services with Zend
Framework. With RPC-style services, you get to cheat: the protocol dictates
the content type (XML-RPC uses XML, JSON-RPC uses JSON, SOAP uses XML,
etc.). With REST, however, you have to make choices: what serialization
format will you support?
Why not support multiple formats?
There's no reason you can't re-use your RESTful web service to support
multiple formats. Zend Framework and PHP have plenty of tools to assist you
in responding to different format requests, so don't limit yourself. With a
small amount of work, you can make your controllers format agnostic, and
ensure that you respond appropriately to different requests.
