Last time out I introduced a basic idea for an API, this post will be about the basic architecture of the API framework. I have been listening to and reading on API best practices published by APIGEE. Although there are one or two things about this guide that I think pidgeon-hole me into certain standards, I agree in most part with a lot of what this e book has to say, I recommend you give it a browse at some point.

Basic Architecture

Enough of this, on to the main point of this post. At the moment Mokocharlie is built on top of the Zend Framework. I put a lot of effort into that and I am not planning on rewriting it soon, I don’t know maybe when we bump up versions to v5 (we are currently in v4). I will be building the API with Laravel 4, although at the time of writing this it has not been officially released, I think there’s enough stability in there to actually use it. So without further ado we proceed.

Get Composer

If at this time you do not have composer installed on your computer please go here and install it now. I chose to do a global installation but you can do whatever you like as long as calling composer in your Laravel working directory works.

Get Laravel 4

• And set up your version control (optional but highly recommended) Get the latest snapshot of the Laravel 4, at this point you can set up a repository to manage your code. We use unfuddle for all our mokocharlie projects and this will be no different. I have however found that the best way to get laravel working as a moving target is track the github repository.

• I create a branch on my local laravel installation called “laravel-tracker”

    git checkout -b laravel-tracker
  

• Add a remote and call it laravel with the url for the laravel git repo

    git remote add laravel git@github.com:laravel/laravel.git
  

• Before I start working on anything I make sure I am in master and then do a git pull on the develop branch from laravel

    git checkout laravel-tracker
    git pull laravel develop
  

• Do a composer update

    composer update
  

• Make sure the application is not broken

    php artisan serve
  

• If I am happy with what I see (in most cases I am), I just kill the server and then checkout master and continue working