RESTing with Symfony: SOS

Two years ago, I wrote REST APIs with Symfony2: The Right Way, one of my most popular blog posts, but also one of the most well-known blog post about Symfony and REST. At first glance, I could enjoy this situation, but it actually makes me sad, and that is what I am going to explain here.

Lukas and I give talks to spread the word about RESTing with Symfony for the last year now. Sure thing is that we have a nice set of components (libraries and bundles) that work well together, and provide a lot of interesting features. For those who are not aware of this, checkout our slides! The Symfony developers behind all of this even contributed to the PHP ecosystem at large as most of the features are provided as standalone PHP libraries. Fantastic!

Not really. Last year, Lukas wrote a blog post explaining what was needed to REST in Symfony, and there was still a lot of work left. Did things change? Not really, again. That was in 2013, and remember that my blog post has been written in 2012.

Come on we are in 2014, and to me, nothing has changed! Sure we have a couple of “recent” blog posts such as the Symfony2 REST API: the best way series. It is a nice series, not only s/right/best, but it covers pretty much the same things I covered two years ago. I didn’t see any other interesting blog post about REST with Symfony recently unfortunately… Lately, Ryan, Leanna and I created a screencast named RESTful APIs in the Real World. I came across a few new bundles, mainly focused on authentication such as ApiKeyBundle and LexikJWTAuthenticationBundle. That is it!

I think that we, the Symfony folks interested in APIs and REST stuff, have two problems:

• a clear lack of contributions (not only in term of code, documentation matters too);
• too few new big features.

For instance, we could probably leverage the GeneratorBundle to scaffold an API. We probably need more integration with client-side applications (AngularJS, Backbone.js, whatever). People could write blog posts explaining how they built their API, because I am pretty sure there are people here who already built an API with Symfony. Existing bundles and libraries also need regular contributors, but this is obvious. Also, if you have other ideas or comments, you can leverage the new Developer eXperience (DX) system.

Please, help!