Internalizing REST API concepts

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around something and would appreciate some reading material on this concept.

I'm writing an app开发者_C百科lication that relies heavily on providing API calls via a URI scheme. example.com/company/user/123123. The aspects of taking a URI string and converting it to an action makes sense.

But where I get confused is taking that process and utilizing within the MVC structure. Do I build calls using models or a library? My goal is to be able to do something like $this->company->user(12311), so that I can have the API functionality available externally and internally.

Also how do I make this functionality accessible without exposing core code?

One of the biggest problems with the word API is that it does not make a distinction between when you are making local in process calls and when you are making remote calls. This is the essence of the RPC style, using the same programmatic model regardless of where the code to be executed exists.

REST is explicitly about doing distributed computing and is optimized for those scenarios. Trying to use a RESTful interface as a local API is likely to produce something that is highly inefficient.

I would suggest not trying to use the same API internally and externally and I would go further and say try not to think of REST as a way of building APIs. REST is an approach to building distributed systems that requires consideration of the system holistically.

To address your question more specifically, I use an MVC approach to exposing Resources in my system. The Model is the Resource and the View is the Representation. The key to building a RESTful system is to identify the links between your models. These links are rendered into the respresentations as embedded links. Also, consider that your models should be more like Presentation Models than domain models as a RESTful interface is more about exposing the usage scenarios of a system than it is about exposing a domain model.