Tonic

A RESTful Web App Development PHP Library

• Homepage
• API Documentation
• GitHub Project

To understand Tonic, you need to get the Web, so forget everything you know for a minute and think about how the Web really works, it's not about HTML pages, it's about resources:

• Everything useful is a resource, not a file, not a CGI script, a resource, an abstract concept of something useful that the client wants to grab hold of.
• Resources are located by URLs, URLs are cheap and form the universal addressing system of the Web.
• Clients can issue a standard number of HTTP methods upon an infinite number of resources and receive something useful in return.
• Representations of resources are sent back to the client, a representation is just a way of turning the abstract concept of a resource into something more concrete, like a HTML page or a XML file. One resource can have many different representations.

Tonic helps you develop Web applications that embrace the way the Web really works, enabling your applications to scale, extend and work with other systems easily.

Quick Example

Front controller

Tonic uses the common front controller pattern to push all required traffic to a single script that then dispatches the request to the correct piece of developer logic to handle the request. The typical dispatcher PHP file looks like:

docroot/dispatch.php

Defining resources

With the dispatcher set up and all requests being forwarded to it by the Web server, we can then define a resource class to handle a request to a specific URL:

resource/example.php

Features

Content negotiation

Content and language negotiation support allowing you to easily pick the best representation for the client request.

Output encoding

Built-in support for compressed responses.

Client side caching

Support for sending correct cache control headers, entity tags, and 304 response codes.

Collection resources

Support for managing a collection of resources.