The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by Sammy Powers, has posted their latest episode looking at HTTPlug, Guzzle and APIs. Sammy is joined by guests Tobias Nyholm, Woody Gilk, *
Steven Maguire* and Brian Retterer.

Guzzle has become the de-facto HTTP-client library for PHP. But recently a number of open source projects have been switching to HTTPlug which boasts itself as an HTTP-client abstraction. We chat about the problems HTTPlug aims to solve, the plans for its future and the reasons behind why some library maintainers have chosen to adopt it or not.

You can catch this latest episode in a few different ways - either through the in-page video or audio player, directly over on YouTube or you can download the audio version for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to keep up with the latest shows as they're announced.

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.

In a new tutorial from the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc shows you how to "break free" from using the Guzzle HTTP client (which has become, by far, the most popular) and make it simpler to go with another option. He highlights the HTTPlug library that makes it easy to do just that.

In a previous series, we built a PHP client for Diffbot. The client works well and is in relatively widespread use – we even tested it on a live app to make sure it’s up to par – but it depends heavily on Guzzle 5.

There are two problems with this: Guzzle 6 is out, and supports PSR 7. [...] Someone implementing our client in their app might already have a preferred HTTP client in use, and would like to use theirs rather than Guzzle. [...] Coincidentally, there is a new project allowing us to do just that: HTTPlug.

He walks you through the installation of the library via Composer and covers what all kinds of functionality it contains. HTTPlug provides an "entry point" and unified interface for the HTTP client of your choosing, complete with interface packages to wrap the most common functionality. He shows how to refactor his Diffbot code to use the package, replacing the previous Guzzle dependency using the virtual package definition HTTPlug provides. He also updates some of the tests to use the HTTPlug package types rather than relying on Guzzle's object return types.