APIfy Your Legacy App with Toro

For the Google Summer of Code 2014, I was selected for a project to create a REST API for ATutor. ATutor has hundreds of thousands of lines of code, yet is written in core PHP. Introducing a PHP router class for the API was necessary, but we needed something unintrusive. In this post, we discuss the essential parts of the project. For this post, all code examples would correspond to my fork of ATutor’s repository (links to files will be provided whenever necessary).

Note - Google Summer of Code is a program where students all around the world can participate in open source projects of mentoring organizations. Google organizes the program and pays the stipends, but the students are not employed by Google at any point during the program.

Web Routing with Toro

The first step in the process was to create or write a PHP class to perform the routing. After considering a few options, we decided to go with Toro, a the light weight PHP router. It performs just the routing - nothing more, nothing less. The syntax is pretty intuitive and you will get started in minutes.

Toro is RESTful- it has support for the standard HTTP methods- GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. There is support for JSON based requests too. All of this is packed in a 120 odd line file.

Before we proceed, one more step was to configure the server to redirect all requests to the router. This can be performed by adding an .htaccess file in Apache, or changing the configuration file of Nginx. This step of server configuration is explained on the README of Toro’s GitHub repository.

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