On the JoliCode.com blog there's a post sharing the experience of writing an API client with PHP including some advice to those out there considering doing the same.

My (love-)story with Docker started in December 2013, after having lost a 2 years long battle against Chef. I had been attracted to Docker for a couple of months, and I finally made the switch the day when I learned that it was built on a REST API. This meant that I could control all my infrastructure from PHP, which is the language I’m most partial to.

After some research, I found the library docker-php built by ubermuda, but, like all the things around Docker at that time, there was only a very limited support of the API. Like any decent developer (yes, it’s a troll), I started to write pull requests to fulfill my needs, and it was both the greatest and the worst thing that happened to me.

The post starts off with a brief history of PHP libraries working with HTTP requests (and the difficulties he had with Guzzle). This includes the fast pace that the library was changing at the time, making it difficult to keep the code maintained. He took a "step back" and decided to look more into HTTPlug and some changes to help bring it up to date. With that choice made, he got into the automation portion and using it work with the Docker API. He talks about some of the other technologies and tools he investigated along the way including Jane for working with JSON message schemas.

Maintaining an open source library is hard and takes time. However, these last years made me realize that we can control it, by moving features into other projects, trust people behind it, and by reducing the feature sets.