Why would you want to create RESTful application interface? A webservice/RESTFUL interface will allow you to create a public interface that allows 3rd party sites to integrate with your applications. RESTful API's allow you to provide open services for your customers. This helps customers by giving them choice in what service they use, and reduces a customer's feeling of being locked into one service. By providing open access to data through webservices you not only benefits your customers, it also benefits you company as well. An open webservice can help attract developers to implement and use your webservice with their application.
Webservices are important to developers as it helps reduce the effort and time needed to make applications work, and makes code easier to maintain. Nate compared different RESTful/webservices solutions, covering SOAP and some of the troubles created by its implementation. SOAP's problems stemmed from its heavy XML payload and single point of access. REST was covered next, and Nate extolled the advantages of REST and how it provides more useful information in the headers. This decreases request size and increases the clarity of what is actually being requested. REST also makes it easier to create CRUD api's. REST favours using the existing HTTP methods over creating method calls in your request bodies. And uses all of the HTTP methods to implement a CRUD interface.
You can easily add REST funtionality to your application with only a few changes. You need to add Router::parseExtension() and add the RequestHandler to your components. This will enable requests like posts/view/1.xml. You then need to add additional view paths for any other extensions you may need. To allow for alternate views you simply need to add an views/posts/xml directory would enable xml views tied to your xml requests. Using Router::mapResources('posts'); will allow you to make GET/POST/PUT/DELETE requests to posts/1.xml and the appropriate action will be triggered. Issues with scaling were raised in regards to REST api's. CakePHP REST implementation scale very well in a horizontal fashion thanks to the way PHP works. Nate stated that the biggest challenge to scaling are still going to be on the Database and latency side, unlike other platforms.
