Mike's Blog
ELib and Twitter
I've been working on a PHP library that can sit alongside Empathy (lightweight MVC) on a purely non-dependant way. The idea being that some of my semi-duplicate code across projects can be re-factored into a central toolkit.Instead of dealing with the boring re-factoring straight away I wanted to work on a simple PHP library for making calls to the Twitter Api (excluding the search API so far). What I think I've ended up with is potentially a nice utility for accessing any REST-ful API with a clean way of defining the API 'specification', perhaps with little-to-no performance hit.I didn't want to look at any existing offerings of PHP library to make it more enjoyable while I pondered an elegant solution of my own. In a fairly paradoxical fashion (as is often the case) the main features revealed themselves in reverse order. I started by building a static array, which could contain the specification of the public API. By doing so I forced myself to consider (sometimes subconciously) the different logic that might be involved in ensuring each variety of call could be easily accessed with a standard interface. Eventually it occured to me that a typical call from a web app might look like this:
$t->doCall('url/to/call/'.$id,
array( 'param1' => $value1, 'param2 => $value2),