Matthew Weier O'Phinney: RESTful APIs with ZF2, Part 2

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted the second part of his series looking at creating RESTful APIs with the Zend Framework v2. In the previous post he covered some of the basics of data and structure. In this new article he looks at content types, status codes and two ways to represent them back to your users.

In my last post, I covered some background on REST and the Richardson Maturity Model, and some emerging standards around hypermedia APIs in JSON; in particular, I outlined aspects of Hypermedia Application Language (HAL), and how it can be used to define a generic structure for JSON resources. In this post, I cover an aspect of RESTful APIs that's often overlooked: reporting problems.

He starts with some of the things around error handling and APIs that bother him and why just returning a status code representing an error isn't enough. He suggests two possible solutions to this issue - two messaging formats, API-Problem and vnd.error. He gives brief summaries of each and includes example output to give them some context.