One project I'm working on for OCLC right now is building a set of object-oriented client libraries in PHP that will assist developers with interacting with our web services. The first of these libraries we'd like to release provides classes for authentication and authorization to our web services. You can read more about Authentication/Authorization and our web services on the Developer Network site<http://oc.lc/devnet>
The purpose of this project is to make a simple and easy to use object oriented library that supports our various authentication methods. This library need to make HTTP requests and I've looked at a number of potential libraries and HTTP clients in PHP. Why am I not just considering using CURL natively? The standard CURL functions in PHP are not object-oriented. All of our code libraries (both our authentication/authorization library and future libraries for interacting with the REST services themselves) need to perform a robust set of HTTP interactions. Using the standard CURL functions would very likely increase the size of the code libraries and the potential for errors and inconsistencies within the code base because of how much we use HTTP. Given this, I believe there are three possible options and would like to get the community's feedback on which option you would prefer. Option 1. - Write my own HTTP Client on top of the standard PHP CURL implementation. This means people using the code library can only download it and now worry about any dependencies. However, that means adding extra code to our library which, although essential, isn't at the core of what we're trying to support. My fear is that my client will never be as good as an existing client. Option 2. - Use HTTPful code library (http://phphttpclient.com/). This is a well developed and supported code base which is designed specifically to support REST interactions. It is easy to install via Composer or Phar, or manually. It is slim and trim and only does the HTTP Client functions. It does create a dependency on an external (but small) library. Option 3. - Use the Zend 2 HTTPClient. This is a well developed and supported code base. The biggest downside is that Zend is a massive code library to require. A developer could choose to download only the specific set of classes that we are dependent on, but asking people to do this may prove confusing to some developers. I'd appreciate your feedback so we can provide the most useful set of libraries to the community. Karen Karen A. Coombs Senior Product Analyst WorldShare Platform [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 614-764-4068 Skype: librarywebchic
