In this new post to his site William Durand looks at creating a RESTful API with the help of the Symfony2 framework.

Designing a REST API is not easy. No, really! If you want to design an API the right way, you have to think a lot about everything, and either to be pragmatic or to be an API terrorist. It's not just about GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. In real life, you have relations between resources, the need to move a resource somewhere else (think about a tree), or you may want to set a specific value to a resource. This article will sum up everything I learnt by building different APIs, and how I used Symfony2, the FOSRestBundle, the NelmioApiDocBundle, and Propel.

It's a long post and covers things very completely with plenty of code samples and descriptions showing you how to use these pieces to make the API. He covers the major HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT & DELETE) as well as one of the lesser used ones - PATCH. He also looks at the HATEOAS documentation method and a brief look at using a simple client to do some testing.