Rob Allen continues his series of posts covering the use of PHP on the OpenWhisk platform. In his latest post he shows how to usr Fractal as the view layer for your application (as installed via Composer). Fractal is a project from the PHP League that "provides a presentation and transformation layer for complex data output, the like found in RESTful APIs, and works really well with JSON."

When writing an API, it’s common to produce an output that conforms to a known media type such as JSON API or HAL, etc. I’m a strong believer that even though I’m writing an API, my application has a view layer. It’s not the same as building an HTML page, but you still need to separate out the code that creates the structured output from your model layer. For a couple of APIs that I’ve written recently, I’ve used Fractal for this.

He starts with some example code showing how to use Fractal to transform data that's come from his datasource. This includes both the script to use the Manager and the class defining the "transformer" for the todo data. He then moves this over and integrates it with an OpenWhisk application, making use of the dependency injection container to create transformer and manager instances. His final example shows this setup in action as the result of a call to fetch all current todo items.