You’ve probably heard a lot of buzzwords lately: API, JSON, and REST among them, however truth be told, REST or Representational State Transfer has always been around as the “language of the internet” (a REST HTTP GET brought you this page!), so it goes without saying that in the age of Internet of Things, REST would become infinitely more important.
REST is made up of 4 things
URI: https://api.ciscospark.com/v1/rooms
Request Type: POST, GET, PUT, etc
Header: Authorization (API key), Content-Type (html, application/xml, application/json)
Body: { “function” : “sendMessage”, “message” : “this is a message”}
JSON is the preferred format over XML because its more efficient. With PHP methods json_encode() and json_decode() for instance, it’s very easy to parse arrays into JSON format and vis a visa.
One of the great things about REST is that when a call is made, it sends a response, which can then in turn be a variable in a second response and so on. It’s not client-server, it’s a conversation.
Check out my demo’s for Spark API and Tropo API for a full writeup of how to write some simple REST calls using an html form and some PHP.