In order to ease adoption and make it more accessible for people to evaluate FRAPI, we’ve put an Amazon AMI together. This AMI comes pre-installed with Linux Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS), NGINX as the webserver, Memcached — (And no, port 11211 isn’t opened to the public), PHP5-FPM, APC and obviously FRAPI.

If you’d like to give this public AMI a spin, just go to Amazon’s instance management section, click on “Launch Instance, go to community AMIs, and search for : “ami-8c28c3e5” . Once you found it, click on “Select” (And make sure to select Port HTTP (80) when asked about which ports to open).

It’s running, now what?

You can go directly to the AMI’s host name in a browser and you will get FRAPI’s default invalid action error, or you can follow these steps to customise it a bit more.

Now that you see your new shiny FRAPI-AMI instance running in your management console, you have a few options:

First option is: Find the “Public DNS” and the “Public IP Address” of the instance you just launched and point your domain-name’s DNS to the IP you found — Your domains could be: api.mydomain.com and admin.api.mydomain.com

Second Option is: If you do not currently hold a domain name for your API, edit your /etc/hosts file (Or the equivalent in your OS) to have an entry that points to the IP of your instance

10.0.0.1 api.mydomain.com admin.api.mydomain.com.

Once you are done with either Option 1 or Option 2, you’ll need to connect to your instance over SSH (ssh ubuntu@hostname-of-the-instance -i your-amazon-cert.pem). Upon connection, you’ll be greeted with a welcome screen giving you some information about FRAPI and the server’s software :

Once you are connected, make sure to “sudo su” and then edit the files that are in /home/ubuntu/sites/. The only thing you have to modify in those files are the “server_name” details. Put either your domain name or your made up domain name that is setup in your /etc/hosts file. The end result should be an admin file with something that contains something along the lines of

and an api configuration file that contains

Don’t give up, you are nearly there, now you have to run : “/etc/init.d/nginx restart && /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart” and you are done.

If you go to the api.mydomain.com in your browser you should now see FRAPI’s default invalid action XML error. If you go to admin.api.mydomain.com you should be able to login with the username “admin” and password “password” — Hint: You should go to the “configurations -> users” section and modify that password.

I want to code something!

SSH into your instance, and go to /home/ubuntu/development/custom/Actions, you will see all your API Controllers there and you can follow the steps here http://wiki.github.com/frapi/frapi/creating-actions (In our case, the generated files go into /home/ubuntu/development/custom/Actions)

To get accustomed you can start playing with Testing1.php and Testing2.php

Don’t hesitate to jump on IRC or on the mailing list and ask questions!

After flying from Dublin (me) and London (Helgi) finally reached Chicago and met up with the PHP Tek crowd. After discussing details with Marco Tabini, we organized a little event to announce our long awaited RESTful API Framework FRAPI.

The party was loud and fun. People chatted, asked a bunch of questions, complained, encouraged us and thanked us. We even turned around and made a live demo with no preparation whatsoever and, believe it or not, there were no bugs during the demo

The future is looking very bright for FRAPI which has attracted a LOT of attention over the past few days and we are looking forward for even more in the coming weeks. Even though there’s still some work to do in terms of documentation and a few things I would like to see changed, I have to admit that FRAPI is in a somewhat cool place right now with the upcoming *any-cache* compatibility (Which means that it will run on windows — wincache) will make it even more interesting. Currently FRAPI only supports APC but this is soon going to be fixed giving FRAPI the ability to run on the likes of Windows Azure and any other platform supported by the caching mechanism.

If you feel like trying out FRAPI, you are more than welcomed to visit http://getfrapi.com and start right away by either downloading FRAPI or forking us on the spot.

I would like to thank everyone at php|architect who have been very helpful and also a big thanks to the sales department in the Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare who have been the most helpful (In fact it may be the most helpful sales team I’ve come across in many years!)

This feature is also well known for people using Hurl which is a website that you can use to make HTTP requests and test your API responses. Also on OSX there’s the HTTP Client Tool which does more or less the same as the ones above.

Another company that announced this feature this week was Apigee:

Use the API Console to review an API’s structure, experiment with the endpoint, and review the request and response messages. We’re launching with support for Twitter APIs and are adding more soon

Apigee is basically an analytics tool for your API. It allows you to track requests, users, errors, etc. So for them, implementing the API tester is something that makes sense as they provide statistics for you API, if you notice an error, you should be able to just test the API call and see if you can reproduce from within Apigee.

All those companies do really cool things, however now I’d like to talk about ourselves a bit here. In Frapi we’ve had a similar feature for quite some time now in order to help our own developers testing and debugging their API. Here’s a little introductory video on  how to create an action and test it from within Frapi.

Frapi API Tester from David Coallier on Vimeo.

Obviously Frapi is on the verge of getting released to the public and we are really eager to get it out. That sort of feature is the reason why we built Frapi To make your lives easier when developing APIs. What do you think?