Web services has always been an important topic. With REST, things became simpler and better. Nowadays, RESTful web services are widely used. It was important a decade ago, but Single Page Applications (SPAs) and mobile applications have increased its usage greatly. The aim of this book is to educate PHP developers about the RESTful web services architecture, the current tools available to efficiently create RESTful web services such as a micro-framework named Lumen, automated API testing, the API testing framework, security and microservices architecture.

Although this book is specific to PHP as we will be building RESTful web services in PHP7, it is neither just about PHP7 nor just about REST. RESTful web services and implementation in PHP is what we do in this book. However, you will learn a lot more than that. You will learn about some PHP features that are new in PHP7. We will cover how we should structure our application and some common threats with respect to the web and web services. You will learn how to improve a basic RESTful web service and understand the importance of testing and the different types of testing. So it is not about just REST or PHP, but also about some minor but important programming-related stuff that is simple but makes things a lot better in the real world. At the end of this book, you will learn about an architecture named microservices.

In other words, although this book is intended for PHP developers, it will benefit them beyond just PHP. So, this book is not a cookbook, but a journey in which you start learning about RESTful webservices and PHP7 and then start building RESTful web services. You can then keep improving your RESTful web services by learning about the problems in it and fixing those. During such improvements, you will learn the different things in PHP and benefit even beyond PHP.