Building a REST API For Your Drupal Site

The documentation is pretty awful, consisting of a few handbook pages on Drupal.org and exhortations to "figure out what a REST server does and you'll understand how to build one". The combination of Services and REST Server get you part way, but a step-by-step process in how to build a module would be useful.

What version of the module to target? 2.x is fairly stable, with work underway on a 3.x branch.

Which version of Drupal to target? 7.x almost ready, 6.x well-established.

• • What is a REST API?

    • explanation

    • benefits

      • allows people, including you, to build applications on top of your website's data

    • costs

  • Services Module

    • what it does

    • how it works

    • authenticating

      • API Keys

      • OAuth

      • etc.

  • REST Server module

    • GET vs. POST

    • Write a custom parser

    • Build a resource module to handle GET requests with parameters coming through a URL