A Description of Hypermedia APIs

Mar 23, 2013

There are many articles describing what a Hypermedia API is. Many have a lot of jargon and cover a lot of topics. This one does neither. Learn what a Hypermedia API is on a basic level.

The 'Best Way' to Setup Laravel 4

Mar 18, 2013

There are a few guides out there which help you install Laravel 4 in a way that let you pull in updates to the skeleton app in addition to the composer-based libraries. I think this is the best, quickest way.

ETags and Optimistic Concurrency Control

Feb 16, 2013

I last wrote about ETags in context of Conditional GETs, which allow a server to see if a resource has been modified since the last time a client checked. If it has not been modified, the server can return a 304 Not Modified response.

API development: ETags and Conditional Get

Feb 10, 2013

My curiosity about ETags (Entity Tags) was first piqued when reading over Github's API documentation. Looking into them, I saw that there explanation often pointed to them as a "cacheing" mechanism.

Error Handling with Content Negotiation

Feb 05, 2013

In looking to build a RESTful API, an important consideration is how to handle errors. Most errors are displayed to users in HTML, as these are web applications. However, API's need some special care.

Laravel 4: Where to put bindings

Jan 27, 2013

If you make judicious use of IoC containers (and Dependency Injection), you'll likely end up with lots of Bindings, some of which may look like:

Laravel 4 Request/Response Lifecycle

Jan 22, 2013

Laravel encapsulates HTTP requests and responses within PHP objects. As you likely know, the HTTP core of Laravel revolves around Symfony's HTTPFoundation component.