Say Hello to Slim World

Today I am going to reveal first part of building REST API in Joomla 3.4 with SLIM Framework. To get started with Slim, here is small introduction about slim framework that is written on SLIM official website. "Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs."

SLIM Hello World Application look like this.

// create new Slim instance
$app = new Slim();

// add new Route
$app->get("/", function () {
    echo "<h1>Hello Slim World</h1>";
});

// run the Slim app
$app->run();

Your first Slim application is ready now. If you access index.php through your browser, you should see a big Hello Slim World.

To use Slim in Joomla, Include slim.php to use slim in your application, as a result slim will autoload all other necessary files that it needs, after this add your routes and create one or more instances of the Slim object.

To add SLIM Framework in your Joomla 3.4 Library Add this code in your composer.json file

{
    "require": {
        "slim/slim": "2.*"
    }
}

and update your composer by

composer update

from your command line.

if you cant find composer.json file in your Joomla root directory, don't worry currently Joomla is not shipping composer.json file, but you can add by copy bellow code.

{
    "name": "joomla/joomla-cms",
    "type": "project",
    "description": "Joomla CMS",
    "keywords": ["joomla", "cms"],
    "homepage": "https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms",
    "license": "GPL-2.0+",
    "config": {
        "vendor-dir": "libraries/vendor"
    },
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.3.10",
        "joomla/application": "~1.2",
        "joomla/di": "~1.2",
        "joomla/registry": "~1.2",
        "joomla/string": "~1.2",
        "joomla/uri": "~1.1",
        "ircmaxell/password-compat": "1.*",
        "leafo/lessphp": "0.3.9",
        "phpmailer/phpmailer": "5.2.8",
        "symfony/yaml": "2.*",
        "slim/slim": "2.*",
        "slim/extras": "~2.0"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "phpunit/phpunit": "4.1.*"
    },
    "autoload": {
        "psr-0": {
            "API":        "api/"    
        }
    }
}

Now create API directory in your root name it as API, directory will look like this.

your-project-name/
  - administrator 
  - api
        -- V1
            --- index.php
        -- JsonApiMiddleware.php
        -- JsonApiView.php
  - bin
  - components
  - images
  - includes
  - language
  - layouts
  - libraries/
    -- vendor
  - logs
  - media
  - modules
  - plugins
  - templates
  - tmp
  composer.json
  composer.lock
  index.php
  configuration.php

Slim library has been auto loaded, now we wil write our API using slim framework in next part.

Part 2 coming soon stay tuned!