The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by Alexander Cogneau that gives you an introductory walkthrough of Fractal, a PHP-based library that provides a translation and presentation layer for the output of your APIs.

If you ever developed for an API, you might have had troubles with changes of your database schema. If you didn’t happen to have a good implementation, you had to rework your whole model when changing some column names. In this article I will demonstrate how you can use Fractal as a layer between your models and JSON output. This post will show you how this package will make API development easier.

He walks you through getting the library installed (via Composer) along with Silex for the application handling and the Illuminate/database package from the Laravel framework. He also provides a SQL file to create the database for the application. The sample app handles music information, providing a simple song and artist list. It uses the Fractal package to transform the data using Transformer objects for each data type.