Ever considered developing a RESTful API? Ever wondered what is FRAPI and how it works? Well apart from reading the frameworks’s website, there was no real way to assess FRAPI as a RESTful API Framework — Not until recently.

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-0adf2f63″ . Once you found it, click on “Select” (And make sure to select Port HTTP (80) when asked about which ports to open).
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Last week Helgi and I had the humongous chance and honour to fly to the “windy city” to PHP Tek 2010. For a change however, the purpose of this trip was not to give a talk at #tekx but to announce the open source release of a little something we’ve been cooking up for a while.

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.

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Lately I’ve noticed that more and more service seem to include API testing in their list of services. For instance this week at Chirp, Twitter announced their development console available on dev.twitter.com which gives you the ability to test the API without really having to write any code just yet.

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.

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As some of you may know from the tweets I’ve been posting for nearly 3 weeks now, I was invited to attend the very first edition of the JumpInCamp organized by Microsoft in April 2010.

The goal of this camp was to get the European PHP community leaders together and learn about the new products and new ideas Microsoft are working on. For those of you who read about the Microsoft web developer summit that took place in Redmond in December 2009 you might think it was the same thing however you would be utterly wrong.

While the camp in Redmond was very informative and we are learnt a great deal of new features coming up with Microsoft, it was vastly different than the JumpinCamp in Zurich where the focus of the camp was to get the developers to interact with the actual Microsoft developers instead of only learning about new features. The point of the JumpinCamp was to get your hands dirty in code so we all got a few hours of lectures, then sat down and worked on either implementing those solutions into our respective Open Source projects or even discussed and raised concerns we might have regarding some of their products.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the projects I’ve started working on while I was over there and what I had interests in:
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