On the IBM developerWorks website today there's a new tutorial showing how to create a REST web service with the help of the Agavi framework.

These days, every Web application worth its salt has a REST API. Flickr has one; so do Google, Bit.ly, and NetFlix, as well as many other popular applications. As an architectural pattern, REST is popular. [...] This article will walk you through the process of building a simple REST API with Agavi. If you already have an Agavi-based application, this article will explain how to leverage existing framework conventions and expose your application innards to third-party developers. If you're creating a new REST-based application, this article will demonstrate how using Agavi can make the process simpler and more efficient.

He starts with an introduction to the REST protocol for making web service requests, covering the basics of verbs and how you can map URLs. From there he steps you through the creation of a sample application with customized routing and modules to handle GET and POST requests for the example book information his service is based on. He also adds in a method that will let you swap out the XML output for JSON.

The IBM developerWorks website has posted the sixth part of their tutorial series on the Agavi framework from Vikram Vaswani. This time he focuses on creating an access control system for their sample application.

Agavi's focus on application security doesn't end with input validation. The framework also exposes a powerful user authentication and access control subsystem that you can customize it to meet the requirements of almost any Web application. This subsystem supports both simple login-based authentication and more complex role-based access control (RBAC), and it provides a solid foundation for application-level privilege management and manipulation.

He introduces the three main principles - passwords, privileges and roles - and shows how to use them with login validation and setting up the user roles (as fetched from a database table). Code examples and screenshots are included as well as a download package of everything.

The IBM developerWorks website has posted the last two articles in the "Introduction to MVC Programming with Agavi" series from Vikram Vaswani - parts four and five.

In part four he looks at creating a simple search engine that can hand you back the results in several different formats like XML, RSS and SOAP.

Part five (the last in the series) focuses on a few of the "finishing touches" to his sample sales platform - paginating results, letting the admin upload files (images of the cars) and adding in custom validation methods for checking things like the max and min of the vehicle's price as entered.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted the third part of their series looking at the Agavi framework and introducing you to come of the core concepts of its use. This part looks specifically at adding authentication/administration functionality to the sample application they've been building.

Over the next few sections, I'll help you make the Web Automobile Sales Platform (WASP) example application even smarter, as you add the ability for users to create, edit and delete records through a Web interface. I'll also discuss the basics of Agavi's security framework, and show you how to restrict certain functions to authenticated users only.

He includes to code to set up the new actions, templates and views as well as including a look at validators, database interaction and how to wrap it all in a simple user authentication script.

The second part of the IBM developerWorks series looking at the Agavi PHP framework has been posted. In it Vikram Vaswani loks at adding forms and database support to his example via Doctrine.

While Agavi can certainly be used to serve up static content, it really shines when you use it for something more complex. And in this second part, you'll do just that - over the next few pages, you'll learn how to receive, validate, and process input from Web forms, as well as connect your Agavi application to a MySQL database.

He returns to his simple templated example site and shows how to use the command line agavi tool to create the routing and controller to handle the "contact us" requests. He includes form validation examples, how to use the population filter, and how to generate the Doctrine models to connect with the form directly.

On the IBM developerWorks site today they've published a new tutorial, the start of a series, from Vikram Vaswani looking at the Agavi framework.

This is the first of a five-part series of articles written for the PHP developer interested in learning about an open-source, flexible, and scalable framework called Agavi. In this first article, you walk through the installation of the framework and the other required components, get an overview of Agavi and its functions, and create your first Web application.

The tutorial looks at installing and configuring the framework and how to get started on a new project (using the agavi command line tool). Screenshots show the resulting output of the command and sample code blocks show the simple structure that's generated. He looks at updates to this basic site including how to display static content and create an overarching "master template" to use as a layout for the whole site.

Chris Hartjes has posted about a topic, while not new in the PHP community it seems to have resurfaced more lately - how MVC is implemented (or not implemented) in most of the PHP-based Rails-esque frameworks.

This guy [making comments at PHP London] apparently works for the Agavi project. [...] The comments for that [reddit] post are really interesting too, as people take their usual swipes at PHP, and CakePHP, and the Symfony guys come out in droves to talk up Symfony, and on and on it goes. Sadly, this is not a unique occurance on the web.

Chris took a closer look at Agavi to see what made its MVC so special - only to find that it just does it different, but not necessarily "right" (he includes a code example to illustrate). He also quotes Wikipedia's definition of an MVC framework and notes that CakePHP seems to fit it to a tee.