API - software architect and Symfony expert

November 17, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

[SymfonyCon] API Platform and Symfony: a Framework for API-driven Projects

Here are the slides of my talk during the Symfony Con Cluj. You can rate this talk on joind.in.

API Platform and Symfony: a Framework for API-driven Projects from Les-Tilleuls.coop

Install API Platform. Design the API data model as a set of tiny plain old PHP classes. Instantly get:

Fully featured dev environment with Symfony Flex and React containers, HTTP/2 and HTTPS support and a cache proxy
Pagination, data validation, access control, relation embedding, filters and error handling
Support for modern REST API formats: JSON-LD/Hydra, OpenAPI/Swagger, JSONAPI, HAL, JSON…
GraphQL support
An API responding in a just few milliseconds thanks to the builtin invalidation based cache mechanism
A dynamically created Material Design admini interface (a la Sonata / EasyAdmin – but 100% client-side) built with React.
Client apps skeletons: React/Redux, React Native, Vue.js, Angular…
Finally, deploy in 1 command on Google Container Engine or any cloud with a Kubernetes instance with the provided Helm chart.

Yes, you just need is describing a data model, just a few line of codes to get all of that!

November 3, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform Admin 0.2: an admin in 1 minute for your API (React Progressive Web App)

The version 0.2 of the API Platform‘s admin component has just been released!

This nice tool allows to automatically and dynamically build a fully featured administration interface (CRUD, pagination, relations…) for any API supporting the Hydra hypermedia vocabulary (more formats supported soon, see at the end of this article). 0 line of code required!

API Platform Admin is built with React on top of the famous Admin On Rest library as a Progressive Web App.

Let’s discover the bunch of new features that this version brings.

Getting Started

Assuming that you have an API exposing a Hydra documentation, you just have to initialize the following React component to get your admin:

import React from 'react';
import { HydraAdmin } from '@api-platform/admin';

export default () => <HydraAdmin entrypoint="https://api.example.com"/>;

import React from 'react';

import { HydraAdmin } from '@api-platform/admin';

export default () => <HydraAdmin entrypoint="https://api.example.com"/>;

For instance, create a new app with Facebook’s create-react-app, replace the content of src/App.js with the previous snippet and run yarn add @api-platform/admin. You’re done!

If you get an error related to multiple versions of React being loaded, just remove the react and react-dom packages from your project’s package.json and run yarn install again.

If you don’t have a JSON-LD / Hydra API yet, here is the code of the one I’ll use in the following examples. This API has been created using the API Platform’s distribution:

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;
use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ApiResource
 */
class Person
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column
     * @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")
     */
    public $name;

    /**
     * @var Greeting[]
     *
     * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Greeting", mappedBy="person", cascade={"persist"})
     */
    public $greetings;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->greetings = new ArrayCollection();
    }

    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    public function addGreeting(Greeting $greeting)
    {
        $greeting->person = $this;
        $this->greetings->add($greeting);
    }

    public function removeGreeting(Greeting $greeting)
    {
        $greeting->person = null;
        $this->greetings->removeElement($greeting);
    }
}

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**

* @ORM\Entity

* @ApiResource

class Person

{

/**

* @ORM\Id

* @ORM\GeneratedValue

* @ORM\Column(type="integer")

private $id;

/**

* @ORM\Column

* @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")

public $name;

/**

* @var Greeting[]

* @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Greeting", mappedBy="person", cascade={"persist"})

public $greetings;

public function __construct()

{

$this->greetings = new ArrayCollection();

}

public function getId()

{

return $this->id;

}

public function addGreeting(Greeting $greeting)

{

$greeting->person = $this;

$this->greetings->add($greeting);

}

public function removeGreeting(Greeting $greeting)

{

$greeting->person = null;

$this->greetings->removeElement($greeting);

}

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;
use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**
 * @ApiResource
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class Greeting
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column
     * @Assert\NotBlank
     * @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")
     */
    public $name = '';

    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Person", inversedBy="greetings")
     */
    public $person;

    public function getId(): ?int
    {
        return $this->id;
    }
}

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**

* @ApiResource

* @ORM\Entity

class Greeting

{

/**

* @ORM\Id

* @ORM\GeneratedValue

* @ORM\Column(type="integer")

private $id;

/**

* @ORM\Column

* @Assert\NotBlank

* @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")

public $name = '';

/**

* @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Person", inversedBy="greetings")

public $person;

public function getId(): ?int

{

return $this->id;

}

Yes, you just need those two tiny PHP classes to get a hypermedia API. Learn more about the API component by reading the getting started guide. But, really, any API with a Hydra documentation will do the job regardless of the server-side programming language.

Native Support for to-Many Relations

API Platform Admin supports to-one relations since its very first release. However it was mandatory to customize the component used for to-many relations. This isn’t the case anymore. Our API documentation parser gained support for cardinalities and can now extract them if the API documentation includes OWL’s maxCardinality properties.

If no cardinality is provided, the admin will use a to-many widget by default.

Thanks to this new feature, here is how the edition screen of the Person resource looks like this:

The admin is able to guess that the Person resource is related to many Greeting ones and use the appropriate Admin On Rest component.

Detection of More Schema.org’s Types (name, url and email)

API Platform Admin is able to guess the widget to use depending of the type of a resource’s property. It supports:

Numbers (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#float and http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer ranges)
Dates (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date and http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime ranges)
Booleans (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#boolean range)
And of course text fields

In this new release, Admin also supports some types of the popular Schema.org vocabulary:

As shown in the previous screenshots (e.g. Greetings select box), if a property has the type http://schema.org/name, this property will be used instead of the ID when displaying this relation
If a property has the type http://schema.org/url, the URL will be clickable when displayed in the admin
If a property has the type http://schema.org/email, the HTML input will be of type email and a basic validation will occur (this was already working in v0.1)

Support for Read-only Resources

The version 0.1 wasn’t able to deal with read-only resource (no POST nor PUT operation). We have improved the API doc parser to support owl:equivalentClass properties. Now, if the API documentation provide those properties, the admin will be builded even if the resource is read-only (of course in this case you will only be able to browse resources, and not to edit them).

Easier and Deeper Customization

Morgan Auchedé did an excellent work to make the Admin fully and easily customizable. You can now override any generated React component by a custom one, or one from Admin On Rest, or from MUI React. You can just replace (or ad, or remove) a specific input or field. But you can also replace a whole list, a show view, a creation or edition form or a remove button.

Here is an example of full customization, courtesy of Morgan:

import parseHydraDocumentation from '@api-platform/api-doc-parser/lib/hydra/parseHydraDocumentation';
import { Datagrid, EditButton, ImageField, List, ShowButton, TextField } from 'admin-on-rest';
import React from 'react';
import SingleImageInput from '../components/inputs/single-image-input';

export default entrypoint => parseHydraDocumentation(entrypoint)
    .then(
        ({ api }) => {
            // Customize "Gallery" resource
            const gallery = api.resources.find(({ name }) => 'galleries' === name);
            gallery.list = (props) => (
                <List {...props}>
                    <Datagrid>
                        <TextField source="id"/>
                        {props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'name'))}
                        {props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'mainImage'))}
                        {props.hasShow && <ShowButton />}
                        {props.hasEdit && <EditButton />}
                    </Datagrid>
                </List>
            );

            // Customize "images" field
            const images = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'images' === name);
            images.field = props => (
                <ImageField {...props} src="contentUrl"/>
            );
            images.input = props => (
                <SingleImageInput {...props} accept="image/*" multiple={true}>
                    <ImageField source="contentUrl"/>
                </SingleImageInput>
            );
            images.input.defaultProps = {
                addField: true,
                addLabel: true,
            };

            // Customize "mainImage" field
            const mainImage = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'mainImage' === name);
            mainImage.field = props => (
                <ImageField {...props} source={`${props.source}.contentUrl`}/>
            );
            mainImage.input = props => (
                <SingleImageInput {...props} accept="image/*" multiple={false}>
                    <ImageField source="contentUrl"/>
                </SingleImageInput>
            );
            mainImage.input.defaultProps = {
                addField: true,
                addLabel: true,
            };
            mainImage.input.defaultProps = {
                addField: true,
                addLabel: true,
            };

            return { api };
        },
    );

import parseHydraDocumentation from '@api-platform/api-doc-parser/lib/hydra/parseHydraDocumentation';

import { Datagrid, EditButton, ImageField, List, ShowButton, TextField } from 'admin-on-rest';

import React from 'react';

import SingleImageInput from '../components/inputs/single-image-input';

export default entrypoint => parseHydraDocumentation(entrypoint)

.then(

({ api }) => {

// Customize "Gallery" resource

const gallery = api.resources.find(({ name }) => 'galleries' === name);

gallery.list = (props) => (

{props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'name'))}

{props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'mainImage'))}

{props.hasShow && <ShowButton />}

{props.hasEdit && <EditButton />}

</Datagrid>

</List>

);

// Customize "images" field

const images = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'images' === name);

images.field = props => (

);

images.input = props => (

</SingleImageInput>

);

images.input.defaultProps = {

addField: true,

addLabel: true,

};

// Customize "mainImage" field

const mainImage = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'mainImage' === name);

mainImage.field = props => (

);

mainImage.input = props => (

</SingleImageInput>

);

mainImage.input.defaultProps = {

addField: true,

addLabel: true,

};

mainImage.input.defaultProps = {

addField: true,

addLabel: true,

};

return { api };

);

Ability to Support Other Formats Such as GraphQL

The parser has been designed to be able to be parse other formats such as a GraphQL schema or Swagger/Open API. The api-doc-parser library provides an intermediate representation that is populated by the specific format parser. It’s this representation that is used by the parser as well as by our React and Vue.js Progressive Web App generator.

It means that when converters from other formats than Hydra to this intermediate representation will be available (Pull Requests welcome), both tools we’ll support those formats. As you may know, the server part of API Platform now supports GraphQL. You can guess which format we’ll implement next in the api-doc-parser!

#GraphQL support just landed in @ApiPlatform⚡️💫🎇! Create a class: done. https://t.co/2QaEzgAb9p Contributed by Raoul Clais and @_alanpoulain pic.twitter.com/asaA62UVTw

— Kévin Dunglas (@dunglas) October 6, 2017

September 22, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

Symfony Live London: API Platform – Full Stack Framework Resurrection

Here the slides of my talk of today at Symfony Live London. Rate this talk.

API Platform: Full Stack Framework Resurrection from Les-Tilleuls.coop

Install API Platform. Design the API data model as a set of tiny plain old PHP classes. Instantly get:

Fully featured dev environment with Symfony Flex and React containers, HTTP/2 and HTTPS support and a cache proxy
Pagination, data validation, access control, relation embedding, filters and error handling
Support for modern REST API formats: JSON-LD/Hydra, OpenAPI/Swagger, JSONAPI, HAL, JSON…
GraphQL support
An API responding in a just few milliseconds thanks to the builtin invalidation based cache mechanism
A dynamically created Material Design admini interface (a la Sonata / EasyAdmin – but 100% client-side) built with React
Client apps skeletons: React/Redux, React Native, Vue.js, Angular…

Finally, deploy in 1 command on Google Container Engine or any cloud with a Kubernetes instance with the provided Helm chart.

Yes, you just need is describing a data model, just a few line of codes to get all of that!

June 8, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform 2.1 Feature Walkthrough: Create Blazing Fast Hypermedia APIs, Generate JS Apps

Update September 18: API Platform 2.1 has now been released. This blog post has been updated according to the syntax used in the stable version.

Finally, after more than 1 year of dev and 3 months of beta, @ApiPlatform 2.1 is out 🍾🎆🙌. A big THANKS to all contributors! #API #PHP #React

— Kévin Dunglas (@dunglas) September 8, 2017

The new UI of API Platform 2.1

API Platform is a framework designed to make the creation of API-based information systems easier. It provides server-side tooling to create modern hypermedia and Linked Data APIs in just a few minutes. This new version introduces client-side tools to bootstrap Single-Page Applications using ReactJS by consuming the autogenerated documentation of the API.

Six months after the release of API Platform 2, I’m very excited to announce the immediate availability of the first beta of API Platform 2.1!

The changelog is huge, more than 200 commits by dozens of developers have been merged. I think we can say that this release will be great!

Let’s review the most interesting new features. If you just want to try it, the demo has been upgraded to use this new version and you can download it on GitHub.

A ReactJS-based Admin System

API Platform automatically exposes API documentations respecting the Hydra (W3C) and Swagger/Open API open standards. We created a dynamic administration system built on top of the awesome Admin On Rest library that takes advantage of the Hydra format.

Just with this line of code <HydraAdmin entrypoint="https://demo.api-platform.com"/>, you will get the following result:

Replace https://demo.api-platform.com by the URL of any API documented with Hydra and you will get a beautiful material design admin for it with:

list, create, show, edit screens as well as a delete button
suitable inputs and fields according to the API doc (e.g. number HTML input for numbers, checkbox for booleans, selectbox for relationships…)
suitable inputs and fields according to Schema.org types if available (e.g. email field for http://schema.org/email)
relationships
pagination
client-side validation for mandatory fields
server-side errors displaying (e.g. advanced validation)

It means that any API Platform API can now have an admin for free! The admin is fully customizable, a follow up post will come.

A React/Redux Webapp Generator

The admin is dynamic, no code generation happens. But sometimes it’s interesting to be able to generate some code to bootstrap a project. It’s exactly what the new api-platform-generate-crud tool does. It parses the Hydra documentation and generates a basic ReactJS webapp with the following features:

generation of high-quality ES6 components and files built with React, Redux, React Router and Redux Form including:
- a list view
- a show view
- a creation form
- an edition form
- a deletion button
generation of the suitable HTML5 input type (number, date…) according to the type of the API property
display of the server-side validation errors under the related input (if using API Platform Core)
client-side validation (required attributes)
the generated HTML is compatible with Bootstrap and includes mandatory classes
the generated HTML code is accessible to people with disabilities (ARIA support)
the Redux and the React Router configuration is also generated

Thanks to Piotr Synowiec for his contributions and fixes to those frontend tools!

Builtin HTTP Cache Invalidation System

Exposing a hypermedia API has many advantages. One of them is the ability to know exactly which resources are included in HTTP responses created by the API. We used this specificity to make API Platform apps blazing fast.

When the new cache mechanism is enabled, API Platform collects identifiers of every resources included in a given HTTP response (including lists, embedded documents and subresources) and returns them in a special HTTP header called Cache-Tags.

A cache reverse proxy supporting cache tags (Varnish, CloudFlare, Fastly…) must be put in front of the web server and store all responses returned by the API with a high TTL. When a resource is modified, API Platform takes care of purging all responses containing it in the proxy’s cache. It means that after the first request, all subsequent requests will not touch the web server, and will be served instantly from the cache. It also means that the content served will always be fresh, because the cache is purged in real time.

The support for most specific cases such as the invalidation of collections when a document is added or removed or for relationships and inverse relations is built-in.

We also included Varnish in the Docker setup provided with the distribution of API Platform, so this new feature works out of the box.

Integration with Varnish and the Doctrine ORM is shipped with the core library. You can easily implement the support for any other proxy or persistence system.

A big thanks to Jérémy Derussé, Teoh Han Hui, Fabien Bourigault, Antoine Bluchet and all other involved contributors for their in-depth reviews and good advices.

A detailed blogpost about this feature will follow.

Per Resource Authorization Mechanism

Thanks to the API Platform’s events and the extension system, it was already easy to configure basic authorization rules. In the version 2.1, we introduced an easy way to configure fine grained authorization rules directly from resource classes.

In the following example, only the logged in admins can access all operations related to the SecuredResource. However, regular users owning a specific resource can also access it:

<?php

namespace AppBundle\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ApiResource(
 *     attributes={"access_control"="has_role('ROLE_ADMIN')"},
 *     itemOperations={
 *         "get"={"method"="GET", "access_control"="object.getOwner() == user"}
 *     }
 * )
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class Secured
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    public $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="text")
     */
    public $owner;
}

<?php

namespace AppBundle\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**

* @ApiResource(

* attributes={"access_control"="has_role('ROLE_ADMIN')"},

* itemOperations={

* "get"={"method"="GET", "access_control"="object.getOwner() == user"}

* }

* )

* @ORM\Entity

class Secured

{

/**

* @ORM\Column(type="integer")

* @ORM\Id

* @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")

public $id;

/**

* @ORM\Column(type="text")

public $owner;

}

Under the hood, this new feature uses Symfony’s access control expressions. The object variable value is the current resource (or collection of resources) while the user variable contains an instance of the Symfony’s user currently logged in.

Subresources Support

Having the ability to expose subresources was one of the most requested features. It was already possible to use such URL patterns thanks to custom operations, but it was a bit complicated to do.

Fortunately Antoine Bluchet rolled up this sleeves and did an excellent job! As of API Platform 2.1, subresources are a first class citizen:

/**
 * @ApiResource
 */
class Product {
    /**
     * @ApiSubresource 
    */
    public $reviews; 
}

/**

* @ApiResource

class Product {

/**

* @ApiSubresource

public $reviews;

}

The previous snippet is enough to expose through http://example.com/products/1/reviews the list of RelatedDummies resources related to the Dummy #1.

The documentations will also reflect the availability of this new URL.

New Filters

API Platform comes with 3 new useful filters that you will love.

property_filter

Baptiste Meyer contributed 2 of them. The first one, api_platform.serializer.property_filter, lets the client specify which properties the API must return.

When a resource is configured to use it, you can use the URL /products/1?properties[]=price&properties[]=currency to only serialize the properties “foo” and “bar” of this entity (all other properties will be ignored).

It’s also possible to list the properties of embedded resources with the following format: /products/1?properties[]=price&properties[brand][]=name.

group_filter

The second one, api_platform.serializer.group_filter is similar, but instead of choosing properties one by one, you can pass a list of serialization groups to apply using a URL like: /products/1?groups[]=detailed.

Those two filters allow to easily reduce the size of the returned resources to only include relevant data.

exists_filter

The last new filter, api_platform.doctrine.orm.exists_filter, was contributed by Teoh Han Hui. It allows to filter a collection on the existence of a specified value: /products?brand[exists]=0.

A Revamped API Doc UI

API Platform has a nice UI built with Swagger UI that is available for every URL of the API when requesting it from a browser (or any client sending a Accept: text/html HTTP header). In API Platform 2.1, we upgraded Swagger UI to its new major version (3.0), a full rewrite in ReactJS (API Platform + React = ❤️) including a bunch of UX improvements.

Laury Sorriaux took this opportunity to propose a great custom stylesheet improving the overall user experience and respecting our color scheme. It also contains an animation featuring our cute spider (he will get a name soon, stay tuned)!

Last but not least, Daniel Kiesel contributed to improve the integration with OAuth (and FOSOAuthBundle): it’s now possible to login with OAuth from the UI by just adding a few lines of config.

Brand New Docker Setup

One of the coolest features of API Platform 2 was the ability to run the app locally by just typing docker-compose up and to deploy apps in a breath with Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.

In API Platform 2.1, we dramatically improved the Docker support:

All images are now using Alpine Linux (reduce the size, improve the security)
Nginx and PHP-FPM are now used instead of Apache and mod_php
Varnish has been added (see the section about the cache invalidation mechanism)
The Docker Compose file has been upgraded to the format v3
Many compatibility problems with Windows have been fixed
The performance when using Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows has been dramatically improved

This Docker setup supports any Symfony-based application. Just copy/paste it in your Symfony project.

Improving the Docker configuration was a hard and collaborative work. I want to especially thanks Jacques Lefebvre, Teoh Han Hui and Antoine Bluchet for the large numbers of hours they spent to make this possible.

Integration in Symfony Flex

You can’t have missed it, Symfony 4 will come with an exciting tool to install and manage your projects: Symfony Flex. API Platform is already officially supported by Flex and can’t be easier to install: just type composer req api

Fabien Potencier (the creator of Symfony) recorded a screencast showing how API Platform and Flex fit well together:

Impressive isn’t it? Flex only works with API Platform 2.1+. Older versions aren’t supported.

Of course, many other new features, fixes and improvements (especially regarding performance) have been merged, you can read the full changelog to learn more.

Next steps before the stable release:

Testing, testing and testing again. Please try the new features, upgrade your existing projects and run your tests suites against this new version! Report any problem on GitHub. It’s very very helpful to us!
Update the documentation and write new articles for the new features. They are already many pull requests opened, reviewing and improving them is much appreciated.

A last and big thanks to all the API Platform Core Team and especially to Teoh Han Hui, Antoine Bluchet, Baptiste Meyer and Hamza Amrouche for their detailed work reviewing all contributions and getting this beta out!

P.S.: Spread the word, please give us a star on GitHub or tweet about the release of this new version!

April 3, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform 2.1: when Symfony meets ReactJS (Symfony Live 2017)

Slides and videos of my talk during the Symfony Live Paris 2017. Rate this talk on joind.in!

API Platform 2.1: when Symfony meets ReactJS (Symfony Live 2017) from Les-Tilleuls.coop

Learn how to use API Platform and Symfony to create super easily rich web and mobile applications relying on React (JS) for their presentational layer.

In just a few minutes, we will create a hypermedia API thanks to API Platform, Symfony and Doctrine. We will do it step by step, and the API will be 100% functional with support for pagination, validation, filters, resources embedding. The API will be automatically documented using Swagger and Hydra and beautiful user interface for developers will be available. HTTP cache, authorization and authentication can then be added in a breath.

Then, we will introduce all new client-side tools for API Platform:

A fully featured JavaScript (Single Page App) administration system with a modern user interface (Material Design) ; built on top of Admin On Rest (React and Redux). This admin is builded dynamically thanks to the API discoverability (Hydra).
A raw React, Redux and React Router code generator to bootstrap fully-featured Single Page Applications and native mobile apps thanks to the API documentation exposed by API Platform (client-side and server-side validation, on fields error, Twitter Bootstrap compatibility, a11y support…)

December 13, 2016 by Kévin Dunglas

[slides] APIDays: Creating hypermedia APIs in a few minutes using the API Platform framework

My talk at APIDays:

API Platform is new open source PHP framework dedicated to the creation of modern web APIs.

It allows to bootstrap a fully featured API (pagination, validation, filtering, sorting, automatically generated documentation, HTTP cache, OAuth and JWT auth…) in just a few minutes.

It exposes out of the box popular API formats including Swagger, JSON-LD, Hydra, HAL, JSONAPI and Schema.org.
It is extensible and can be specialized with ease. Because it is built on top of the industry-leading Symfony framework, it already counts hundreds of available extensions (bundles).

In this talk, I’ll show how to create a hypermedia API in just a few lines of codes, then take a look to the main features of the framework.

Download the PPT (“download” button) to see screencasts!

Creating hypermedia APIs in a few minutes using the API Platform framework from Les-Tilleuls.coop

November 24, 2016 by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform 2.0 released: creating powerful web APIs has never been so easy

After 1 year of development and more than 700 commits authored by a hundred contributors across the world, the new major release of API Platform is immediately available for download.

API Platform is a PHP 7 framework dedicated to the creation of modern and powerful web APIs. It is especially adapted to build API-centric information systems relying on hypermedia, Linked Data; and consumed by Single-Page Applications (using Javascript libraries such as React or Angular) and mobile apps.

API Platform 2 has been built with 3 strong opinions in mind:

Creating an API must be an easy and quick process: any web developper should be able to create a REST API in just a few minutes including CRUD support, data validation, filtering and sorting, autogenerated documentation, OAuth and JWT authentication, CORS and other security HTTP headers, caching…
Modern open formats must be supported out of the box, without requiring any extra work for the developper: Swagger/OpenAPI, JSON-LD, Hydra, HAL, API Problem (RFC 7807) and Schema.org are supported out of the box, the powerful abstraction layer of the framework easily allows adding support for other emerging API formats (JSONAPI and GraphQL support is in progress)
Every feature of the framework must be extensible, overridable and modular

API Platform v2 is a massive rewrite of the framework, with tons of new features and bug fixes. The whole design has been rethinked, but let’s take a tour of the major new features and changes:

Revamped Config and Metadata: Exposing an API is a Matter of Seconds

Thanks to the new configuration system and the new metadata component, to create a high grade hypermedia API you just have to modelize your data model as a set of PHP classes then to add some annotations. Example:

<?php

// src/AppBundle/Entity/Book.php

namespace AppBundle\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**
 * A book.
 *
 * @ApiResource
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class Book
{
    /**
     * @var int The id of this book.
     *
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     */
    public $id;

    /**
     * @var string|null The ISBN number if this book (or null if doesn't have one).
     *
     * @ORM\Column(nullable=true)
     * @Assert\Isbn
     */
    public $isbn;

    /**
     * @var string The title of this book.
     *
     * @ORM\Column
     * @Assert\NotBlank
     */
    public $title;

    // Prefer private properties, accessors and mutators in real applications
}

<?php

// src/AppBundle/Entity/Book.php

namespace AppBundle\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**

* A book.

* @ApiResource

* @ORM\Entity

class Book

{

/**

* @var int The id of this book.

* @ORM\Id

* @ORM\GeneratedValue

* @ORM\Column(type="integer")

public $id;

/**

* @var string|null The ISBN number if this book (or null if doesn't have one).

* @ORM\Column(nullable=true)

* @Assert\Isbn

public $isbn;

/**

* @var string The title of this book.

* @ORM\Column

* @Assert\NotBlank

public $title;

// Prefer private properties, accessors and mutators in real applications

}

This single class is enough to get a working API with the following features:

basic CRUD operations
data validation and error serialization
JSON-LD, Swagger, Hydra support (a lot of other formats can easily be added, see below)
pagination
an awesome UI and an extensive human-readable documentation reusing PHPDoc’s data and PHP metadata like types (see below)

Checkout our demo to play with a more advanced example (source code, only 2 classes)!

Hypermedia relations are handled out of the box. Leveraging any other feature of API Platform is just a matter of adding a few lines of configuration. Learn more in our getting started guide.

If you don’t like annotations, you can use XML or YAML configuration files instead. If you don’t like the Doctrine ORM (or doesn’t want to tight the exposed data model to the internal model of the database); or if you don’t want to use the Symfony validator, you can create adapters to hook your custom code and use your preferred libraries. API Platform is designed to be fully extensible.

Docker Integration

API Platform’s official distribution is shipped with a Docker setup adapted to API devlopment. It includes a Apache + PHP 7 and a MySQL image. To get an API Platform app up and running on your computer, type the following commands in the main directory:

$ docker-compose up -d # Download, build and run Docker images
$ docker-compose exec web bin/console doctrine:schema:create # Create the MySQL schema, only required one time

1 2	$ docker-compose up -d # Download, build and run Docker images $ docker-compose exec web bin/console doctrine:schema:create # Create the MySQL schema, only required one time

The app is up and running, browse http://localhost to get started.

API Platform’s images can be deployed easily in production using Docker Swarm (Amazon Web Services, Azure…) or Google Container Engine (with Kubernetes).

A Data Model Generator on Steroid

Instead of crafting your own data model, why not reusing an open vocabulary like the very popular Schema.org and feel the power of Linked Data and Semantic Web? Yes, just like Google but for free.

Since its first release, API Platform comes with a handy code generator allowing to bootstrap a whole PHP data model including classes, properties, getters and setters, full PHPDoc, Doctrine mappings, API Platform’s external vocabulary mappings and validation annotations.

This generator has been updated to match the new configuration format of API Platform 2 and to allow generating custom classes and properties.

The following config file contains a selection of Schema.org’s types and properties. When using the generator to create the corresponding data model, a working API is created without writing a single line of PHP:

types:
    Book:
        parent: false # Generate only one class, not the full hierarchy from Schema.org
        properties:
            isbn: ~
            name: ~
            description: ~
            author: { range: Text }
            dateCreated: ~
    Review:
        parent: false
        properties:
            reviewBody: ~
            rating: { range: Integer, nullable: false } # This is a custom field that doesn't exist in the vocab
            itemReviewed: { range: Book, nullable: false, cardinality: '(*..1)' }

types:

Book:

parent: false # Generate only one class, not the full hierarchy from Schema.org

properties:

isbn: ~

name: ~

description: ~

author: { range: Text }

dateCreated: ~

Review:

parent: false

properties:

reviewBody: ~

rating: { range: Integer, nullable: false } # This is a custom field that doesn't exist in the vocab

itemReviewed: { range: Book, nullable: false, cardinality: '(*..1)' }

Learn more about the generator in the docs and the demo application.

Content Negotiation and Built-in Support for JSON-LD, Hydra, HAL, YAML, CSV and XML

API Platform now natively supports content negotiation (only JSON-LD and Hydra was previously supported) as well as most popular API formats. To be able to retrieve or send resources in a specifc format, you enable them in the configuration file:

# app/config/config.yml

api_platform:
    formats:
        jsonld:  ['application/ld+json']
        jsonhal: ['application/hal+json']
        xml:     ['application/xml', 'text/xml']
        json:    ['application/json']
        yaml:    ['application/x-yaml']
        csv:     ['text/csv']
        html:    ['text/html'] # This is the API Platform UI

# app/config/config.yml

api_platform:

formats:

jsonld: ['application/ld+json']

jsonhal: ['application/hal+json']

xml: ['application/xml', 'text/xml']

json: ['application/json']

yaml: ['application/x-yaml']

csv: ['text/csv']

html: ['text/html'] # This is the API Platform UI

This config enable all built-in formats (Symfony 3.2, actually in RC stage, is required for YAML and CSV support). Then, you can request the format you want through the UI using the proper Accept HTTP header, or by adding the format name as extension of any URL of the API (example: https://demo.api-platform.com/books.jsonld).

Support for formats not supported by default can be added by writing custom adapters.

Learn more about content negotiation in API Platform.

A Powerful UI and Automatic Swagger 2 Docs

API Platform 2 generates an extensive Swagger 2/OpenAPI documentation. All URLs and types are automatically described thanks to our powerful metadata extraction system.

A web interface built on top of Swagger UI is also automatically available. Request any API’s URL using a web browser and (thanks to the Accept header sent by the browser), API Platform will display the request sent to the API and the received response in a nice web interface. It will also display a human-readable documentation of the current operation.

Browse the homepage to see the documentation of all available operations, including the description of resources and properties extracted from PHP metadata. Use the sandbox to play with your API.

New Filters and Extension Mechanism

Several new built-in filters have been added. In addition to the existing search, date and range filters, the following are now available:

boolean: filter by a boolean property
numeric: search numeric fields

The filters are now available directly from the UI and documented in both Swagger and Hydra formats.

Learn how to add filters to your API collections.

Filters are now implemented using the brand new extension system. This system allows to hook to the database query generation process and to customize them. It’s particularly useful to implement security features.

Learn how to leverage the extension mechanism to filter the result of an entrypoint depending of the role of the connected user in the documentation.

Secure by default, tested against OWASP’s recommendations for REST APIs

API Platform 2 follows OWASP’s security recommendations for all its built-in features. We created a test suite to ensure that all recommendations applying to API Platform are followed and documented.

Checkout what API Platform 2 do to secure your API.

Improved performance

We are continuously improving the performance of API Platform and Symfony components it uses (like the Serializer or the PropertyAccess component). This new version is faster than v1 and automatically optimizes SQL queries regarding current serialization groups.

API Platform 2 is also compatible with PHP PM. When using it, API response times are divided by 10.

Availability as Standalone Components, Decoupled from Symfony and Doctrine

API Platform is designed as a set of standalone PHP components: the metadata system; JSON-LD, Hydra, Swagger, HAL serializers, Doctrine and Symfony components bridges…

All those components can be used separately to create your own APIs. For now, the Core library must be downloaded, but a subtree split to allow specific component installation will be available for the 2.1 version. Specific classes can already be used separately of the standard distribution, and without Symfony.

We also moved the code generic enough directly to Symfony. For instance the new Symfony’s PropertyInfo component has been extracted from API Platform. Some new bug fixes and new features and like the MaxDepth as well as YAML and CSV support for the Symfony Serializer has been done while working on API Platform.

Doctrine has never been mandatory to use API Platform, but the set of interfaces to implement to use another persistence system has been rethought and is now documented.

Quality and QA improvements

We dramatically improved the quality of the API Platform code base for this v2. API Platform v1 was already well tested through Behat. In v2 we added a lot of unit tests to prevent bugs and prove that every class respect SOLID principles. The code coverage is now of 96%. Our test suite is automatically run both on Linux (using Travis) and Windows (using AppVeyor).

We also used Scrutinizr and SensioLabs Insight to detect bad practices and improve the overall quality of our code base. API Platform is rated 8.7/10 on Scrutinizr and has the Platinum medal (best rating) on Insight.

Documentation Rewrite and New Website

The documentation has been improved, almost all new features documented and the Getting Started guide fully rewrote. A new website built with React and Redux has also been created. It supports universal rendering and provides a powerful search engine thanks to Algolia’s DocSearch.

A Growing Community

API Platform it’s more than 100 contributors, an awesome core team (Amrouche Hamza, Antoine Bluchet, Samuel ROZE, Teoh Han Hui, Théo FIDRY, Vincent CHALAMON and myself), workshops and conferences talks across the world (don’t miss the workshop at the Berlin’s Symfony Con next week).

API Platform has been in the top GitHub trending PHP repositories several times during past months (and 1st one time) beside great projects like Laravel, Symfony and WordPress and has now more than 1k stars.

It’s amazing! Thanks to everybody having worked on the code base, contributed to the documentation or evangelized about the solution, you rock!

Training, development, professional services and workshops are also provided worldwide by Les-Tilleuls.coop, API Platform’s creators.

What’s next

The release of API Platform v2 is just the first step! We’re already working on new features and some of them are already ready to be merged in the 2.1 branch including:

More to come! Stay tuned!

If you haven’t already done it, it’s time to give a try to API Platform!

October 21, 2016 by Kévin Dunglas

[Slides] Take Off Conf 2016: Creating a hypermedia API in 5 minutes with API Platform

This morning I was speaking about the API Platform framework at the Take Off Conf in my hometown of Lille. Take a look at my slides, and learn how to create a fully featured hypermedia API in a few minutes!

April 9, 2015 by Kévin Dunglas

Mes slides du Symfony Live 2015 : à la découverte de API Platform

Voici les slides concernant le développement d’API hypermerdia diffusés tout à l’heure lors du Symfony Live de Paris.

Les liens vers les différents outils présentés tout à l’heure :

API Platform
PHP Schema (utilisable seul)
DunglasJsonLdApiBundle (utilisable avec n’importe quelle application Symfony)

Les slides en plein écran.

March 23, 2015 by Kévin Dunglas

Symfony Live 2015 : Construire des applications API-centric avec Symfony

Symfony Live 2015

Je donnerai une conférence de 40 minutes au Symfony Live 2015 qui se déroulera le 9 avril à la Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris.

J’y parlerai de la conception et du développement d’applications construites autour d’une API REST :

Au cours de ce talk, je présenterai une architecture moderne qui permet de construire des applications performantes, évolutives et interopérables :

un modèle de données dérivé du vocabulaire Schema.org généré avec PHP Schema

une API REST hypermedia et auto-découvrable (JSON-LD + Hydra) réalisée avec DunglasJsonLdApiBundle (sa première version sera dévoilée lors du Symfony Live)

sérialisation et validation avancées des données grâce aux nouvelles fonctionnalités du composant Serializer de Symfony 2.7 et du Validator

authentification stateless (cookie-less) avec JSON Web Token et LexikJWTAuthenticationBundle

clients divers et variés avec AngularJS, Guzzle, Twig, des applications mobiles natives, des logiciels métiers etc

BDD et web acceptance testing avec Behat, Mink et Behatch

Le talk sera didactique et accessible aux développeurs Symfony de tous niveaux. La construction d’une micro-application suivant cette architecture sera présentée pas à pas.

17 autres conférences atuour de Symfony auront lieu lors du même évènement. Les billets sont en vente sur le site du Symfony Live.

Kévin Dunglas

Software architect and Symfony expert

Archives

[SymfonyCon] API Platform and Symfony: a Framework for API-driven Projects

API Platform Admin 0.2: an admin in 1 minute for your API (React Progressive Web App)

Getting Started

Native Support for to-Many Relations

Detection of More Schema.org’s Types (name, url and email)

Support for Read-only Resources

Easier and Deeper Customization

Ability to Support Other Formats Such as GraphQL

Symfony Live London: API Platform – Full Stack Framework Resurrection

API Platform 2.1 Feature Walkthrough: Create Blazing Fast Hypermedia APIs, Generate JS Apps

API Platform 2.1: when Symfony meets ReactJS (Symfony Live 2017)

[slides] APIDays: Creating hypermedia APIs in a few minutes using the API Platform framework

API Platform 2.0 released: creating powerful web APIs has never been so easy

Revamped Config and Metadata: Exposing an API is a Matter of Seconds

Docker Integration

A Data Model Generator on Steroid

Content Negotiation and Built-in Support for JSON-LD, Hydra, HAL, YAML, CSV and XML

A Powerful UI and Automatic Swagger 2 Docs

New Filters and Extension Mechanism

Secure by default, tested against OWASP’s recommendations for REST APIs

Improved performance

Availability as Standalone Components, Decoupled from Symfony and Doctrine

Quality and QA improvements

Documentation Rewrite and New Website

A Growing Community

What’s next

[Slides] Take Off Conf 2016: Creating a hypermedia API in 5 minutes with API Platform

Mes slides du Symfony Live 2015 : à la découverte de API Platform

Symfony Live 2015 : Construire des applications API-centric avec Symfony

Partager :

Getting Started

Native Support for to-Many Relations

Detection of More Schema.org’s Types (name, url and email)

Support for Read-only Resources

Easier and Deeper Customization

Ability to Support Other Formats Such as GraphQL

Partager :

Partager :

Partager :

Partager :

Partager :

Revamped Config and Metadata: Exposing an API is a Matter of Seconds

Docker Integration

A Data Model Generator on Steroid

Content Negotiation and Built-in Support for JSON-LD, Hydra, HAL, YAML, CSV and XML

A Powerful UI and Automatic Swagger 2 Docs

New Filters and Extension Mechanism

Secure by default, tested against OWASP’s recommendations for REST APIs

Improved performance

Availability as Standalone Components, Decoupled from Symfony and Doctrine

Quality and QA improvements

Documentation Rewrite and New Website

A Growing Community

What’s next

Partager :

Partager :

Partager :

Partager :