Web Services in today's applications and websites have become critical to interacting with third parties. A lot of Drupal developers have the need to expose content and features on their site via an API. Luckily for us, Drupal 8 now has this capability in Core. And some contrib modules are attempting to make it even better. In this webinar, we will discuss what you can do with Drupal 8, what is included in core, and what is not. Topics covered will include what is new with REST in Drupal 8 and what it aims to solve. Attendees will learn: - What CRUD is and how to use it - What you can do with REST in Core - How to use and build on Services in Drupal 8 - How Drupal 8, Acquia, and Palantir can help you succeed

1. Web APIs in Drupal 8
Larry Garfield, Senior Architect, Palantir.net
Kyle Browning, Technical Consultant, Acquia

2. Larry Garfield
Senior Architect, Palantir.net
Drupal Web Services Lead
Who are we?

3. Kyle Browning
Technical Consultant, Acquia
Services, and Drupal iOS SDK maintainer
Who are we?

4. What are Web Services(tm)?

5. The Internet (TCP/IP)
The Web (HTTP)
Web Services (non-HTML)
REST (REpresentational State Transfer)

6. Collection of Resources
Resource identified by URI
Resource represented in a format
Manipulate through Verbs/Methods
Known hyperlinks to other Resources
REST (Hypermedia)

7. So what's wrong with Drupal 7?

8. Drupal 7
function example_menu() {
$items['my/page'] = array(
'title' => 'My page',
'page callback' => 'my_page_function',
'access arguments' => array('access content'),
);
return $items;
}
Only map on path
Very basic access control

9. Drupal 7
function example_page_delivery_callback_alter(&$delivery_callback) {
if (...) {
$delivery_callback = 'example_deliver_page';
}
}
Happens after the page callback, so mostly useless.

10. Drupal 7
→And oh yeah, globals
▪ $_GET
▪ drupal_add_http_header()
▪ print

11. Drupal 7
Everything other than a full HTML page is an after-thought.

12. So what's better in Drupal 8?

13. Drupal 8
example.route:
path: /my/page
defaults:
_controller: 'DrupalexampleControllerExampleController::page'
_title: 'Example page'
requirements:
_permission: 'access_examples'
_day: 'Tuesday'
_method: 'GET'
Multiple access checks
Map on path,

14. Drupal 8
Arbitrary custom logic goes here

15. Drupal 8
Theming and page layout happen here

16. Drupal 8
Everything's an HTTP Response. Sometimes that's a page.

17. Drupal 8
→You can serve any type of response to a request
→Wire directly to the routing system.
→No duplicating routing anymore!

18. Drupal 8 - Serialization module
→Standard serialization/deserialization pipeline
→Built on Symfony Serializer component
$json = $this->serializer->serialize($entity, 'json');
$xml = $this->serializer->serialize($entity, 'xml');
$entity = $this->serializer->deserialize($json, 'Node' 'json');
Standard universal serialized format (for internal structure)!

19. Drupal 8 - REST module
→Core module for common pattern of REST usage
→~RestWS
→Uses Serialization
→Define "Resource" Plugins
▪ GET/get(), PUT/put(), DELETE/delete()
▪ Return ResourceResponse
▪ Drupal will serialize()/deserialize() for you

20. Drupal 8 - REST resources
class DBLogResource extends ResourceBase {
public function get($id = NULL) {
if ($id) {
$record = db_query("SELECT * FROM {watchdog} WHERE wid = :wid", [':wid' => $id])
->fetchAssoc();
if (!empty($record)) {
return new ResourceResponse($record);
}
throw new NotFoundHttpException(t('Log entry with ID @id was not found', ['@id' => $id]));
}
throw new HttpException(t('No log entry ID was provided'));
}
}

21. Drupal 8 - REST resources
All Content Entities are supported out-of-the-box
● Uses same URL as HTML page
● All supported formats, automatically
● Opt-in configuration
Easily add your own resources, too
Teach serializer about it (Normalizer)
Create new Resource plugin
Profit!!1!

22. Drupal 8 - Content Negotiation
Reverse proxies suck
+
Browsers suck even more
=
Accept-based negotiation is broken 90% of the time :-(

23. Drupal 8 - Content Negotiation
http://example.com/node/5?&_format=hal_json
http://example.com/node/5?&_format=xml
http://example.com/node/5?&_format=html (default)

24. Drupal 8
REST UI

25. Drupal 8
REST UI

26. Drupal 8 - Hypermedia Links
Coming soon!
(8.1? As soon as someone works on it.)
https://www.drupal.org/node/2113345

27. What does Services module do?

28. Drupal 8 - Services
→Provide endpoint capabilities to put your API behind a
centralized URL
→Standardize on an approach to building non-REST
APIs
→Accept Header content negotiation
→Gives us regular json response instead of hal_json
→Config entities too!

29. Drupal 8 - ServicesDefinition
→Defines the ‘resource’
→Protein of Services in
D8
→Route Access
→Request method

30. Drupal 8 - ServicesDefinition

31. Still respects core

32. Config Entities!

33. Lets grab a block

34. Create a block

35. Update a block

36. And since everything is an entity.

37. Drupal 8 - Views

38. Respects Permissions

39. Thank You