REST API Platforms?

[David Schwartz]

Many companies are looking at building mobile apps, and they’d typically need a back-end DB to manage things.

But with a back-end DB, you probably also need an “admin” portal that has more features than the mobile app can provide.

I’ve been using this Windows app, AppGini, that lets you build some fairly complicated form-based web apps built in PHP and MySQL. It has full support for managing users, security levels, access restrictions, and all of that stuff. AppGini apps can be run nearly anywhere that has php V5.3+ and MySQL V3.2+ supported.

What I’m looking for is a fairly simple way to build out a REST API interface that would allow mobile apps to talk to the database maintained by the back-end “admin” app, preferably hosted alongside the admin app.

I’ve been doing some Googling and I came across the term “REST API Platforms” that seems to be the magical keyword needed for this kind of thing. I discovered there are a bunch of platforms available, like Kong, Apigee, Swagger, API-platform, and others. Some are open-source and some are strictly commercial. Some are hosted, some can be hosted anywhere. They all claim to be super-easy to use, although I’m sure that’s a highly-relative term.

I’m familiar with REST APIs from the consumer/client side, and know virtually nothing about the publisher/server side.

Does anybody here know much about the publisher/server side? In particular, are these REST API Platforms useful for what I’m looking at? Or is it easier to just write the needed PHP code by hand?

What’s the best way to learn more about this stuff?

Ideally, I’d like something that can access the MySQL tables, lets me point-and-click and set some options, and it will spit out the code.

-David Schwartz




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