Development : Lift off!

This is the first blog entry for Radius Desk

It will make use of CakePHP 2.X as a RESTfull interface

It will also make use of Extjs4 to create a Webtop (Desktop running in the browser)

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We will start with a device and conquer approach. The following sections will discuss how to do this approach.

Token authentication

Description

RESTfull services are suppose to be stateless.

In order to do this in CakePHP while maintaining a secure API we will assign a token to each user and use this token as the username with basic authentication when doing RESTfull requests to CakePHP

Task	Progress
Design a basic database with users, groups, aros and acros	0%
Create a dummy RESTfull interface that will make use of a token	0%
Create a CakePHP shell to test the RESTfull interface	0%

Creating a RESTfull interface notes

In the file radiusdesk/Config/Routes.php add the following:

//Specify which resources (controllers) should be mapped to the RESTfull interface Note the smalls
Router::mapResources(array('users','groups'));
//Inform CakePHP to also consider .json URLs  
Router::parseExtensions('json');

Also add the following component to the AppController

public $components = array('RequestHandler');

Also you need to modify the output of a controller action to include the _serialize

~~~~~~~~
public function index() {
$this->User->recursive = 0;
$this->set('users', $this->paginate());
$this->set('_serialize', 'users');
}
~~~~~~~

Note that you do not have to create a json view explicitly to a RESTFull request for JSON

This will allow us to work with the RESTfull interface as follows:

HTTP format	URL.format	Controller action invoked
GET	/recipes.format	RecipesController::index()
GET	/recipes/123.format	RecipesController::view(123)
POST	/recipes.format	RecipesController::add()
PUT	/recipes/123.format	RecipesController::edit(123)
DELETE	/recipes/123.format	RecipesController::delete(123)
POST	/recipes/123.format	RecipesController::edit(123)