PHP rest API returning JSON for webpages

Question

I am developing a PHP restful API which is returning a JSON response. This is currently for native mobile app consumption (iOS/Android).

My question, is it possible to use the same restful API for website consumption? or do I need to support HTML response from the restful API as well as JSON? How do you get a JSON response from a web service to display as a webpage? or do I need to implement output formatters as part of the framework to respond as HTML when required?

I have tried to search for answers to this question but I couldn't find any useful answer.

• Franco: You can use ajax for that. There are a lot of questions about that. Here is one of them: stackoverflow.com/questions/10941249/…
• jHilscher: It's pretty standard nowadays to use a rest api/json to build up a website backend. Have a look at the various JavaScript Frameworks which will handle data binding, ajax etc etc .

Answer 1

Emm... As theory, for example you can make it like this:

class MyOutput
{
 const CTX_HTML = 1;
 const CTX_JSON = 2;
 //const CTX_XML = 3;
 //const CTX_CLI = 4;
 //const CTX_ETC = N;
 private $_data = null;
 public function __construct()
 {
 $this->_data = new StdClass();
 }
 public function __set($prop, $value)
 {
 $this->_data->{$prop} = $value;
 }
 public function render($context)
 {
 if ($context == self::CTX_JSON) {
 header('Content-Type: application/json');
 echo json_encode($this->_data);
 } else {
 header('Content-Type: text/html');
 // TODO extract/pass data into layout/template
 }
 }
}
$Output = new MyOutput();
$Output->foo = 1;
$Output->bar = 2;
$Output->render(MyOutput::CTX_JSON);
$Output->render(MyOutput::CTX_HTML);

But i think API should be place on separated host. Because this is different applications.

Answer 2

you can create API that returns XML and from XML using XSL construct HTML

This link gonna be helpful:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/xml/converting-xml-to-html-using-xsl.html