As a part of this year's php|tek conference, the folks at php|architect once again put together their choices for the "Impact Awards", a special recognition for projects that have really made a mark over the last year in a few different categories.

As part of the grand finale of php|tek '11, Keith Casey announced the winners of the first annual php|architect Impact Awards. These awards are selected by the subscribers of php|architect magazine. They represent the projects that have had the most impact on the day-to-day lives of PHP developers. php|architect is proud to announce the winners of this year’s Impact Awards.

Winners this year included the Frapi (in Up & Coming), MySQL (in Data Management), Xdebug (in Integration/Development) and the Best Overall Product winner - the Zend Framework.

In some of his development work, Chris Hartjes has come across two tools that have made his life simpler, one that's specifically related to PHP and building APIs.

Well folks, I’ve had another one of these ["why didn't I see this earlier"] moments. What is it? Repeat after me: THOU SHALL BUILD YOUR APPLICATION AS AN API FIRST, AND FRONT END SECOND. [...] So, here are two tools that I think my readers should know about. For those working with PHP, I cannot recommend enough the use of FRAPI if you have a legacy application that you need to provide an API for.

He talks a bit about what FRAPI is and how it can help lay right on top of your current application to create a full-featured API without much of the hand-coding hassle. It does a lot of the work for you, generating the files needed and handling REST requests right out of the box.

The documentation via the wiki isn’t that great, but it gives you everything you really need to get started. Kudos to the boys at echolibre for creating a super-useful tool.

New on the Zend Developer Zone is a tutorial from Trevor Morse about creating an API with the help of FRAPI, a tool built to make creating API interfaces simple and easy by providing a framework to build on top of rather than rolling your own.

You have been asked to create a RESTful API to allow access to all the great features of your application. Of course there are a few options; you could write the code yourself to handle all the new API functionality, or you could use an existing framework that handles most of this for you. When starting to look at creating a RESTful API for web2project I came across FRAPI and loved what I saw.

He introduces FRAPI and talks about some of the features it includes including a nice testing interface so you don't have to have a separate tool. He goes through the process of creating a new action - setting up a route, adding parameters - and how FRAPI automatically generates the classes you'll need to respond correctly to REST requests. He goes on to talk about setting response codes, scalability concerns and how to integrate it into a project.

On the echoLibre blog today there's a new post talking about the release party (at the TekX conference in Chicago) for their latest project - FRAPI, a RESTful API framework that's already generating a lot of buzz.

The party was loud and fun. People chatted, asked a bunch of questions, complained, encouraged us and thanked us. We even turned around and made a live demo with no preparation whatsoever and, believe it or not, there were no bugs during the demo. The future is looking very bright for FRAPI which has attracted a LOT of attention over the past few days and we are looking forward for even more in the coming weeks.

If you'd like to find out more about the FRAPI framework and how it can help you in easily creating RESTful applications, check out the project's website. There's details on the framework, learn how to get involved and give back to the project and how it lets you focus on the the important things, like the business logic, while handling the presentation for you.