Introduction
Webpipes are tiny HTTP programs that do one thing and do it well. They fill in the gaps. Need a proxy? Need to convert Markdown to HTML? Give a Webpipe some input, and it'll give you some output. They're a handy tool to have in your arsenal.
Think of Webpipes as extending your standard library over HTTP. If you're missing a library in your language of choice, there could be webpipe available instead.
Webpipe.php interacts with webpipes.org, a centralized Webpipe registry and dispatching service.
Setup
Add webpipe.class.php to your project folder and don't forget to require().
require('webpipe.class.php);
Usage Example
Webpipe.php exposes two methods: $webpipe->manual() and $webpipe->request().
$webpipe->request()
The real workhorse is $webpipe->request(). This allows you to make requests to any webpipe in registry.webpipes.org.
In this example, let's send a request to the 'proxy' webpipe to fetch my README.markdown for this project from github.
<?php
// Init
$webpipe = new Webpipe();
// Make our webpipe request
$response = $webpipe->request("proxy", array(
"method" => "GET",
"url" => "https://raw.github.com/matthewhudson/webpipe.php/master/README.markdown"
));
// Print the webpipe response
if ($response) {
print "<pre>" . $response . "</pre>";
} else {
print "<pre>Error</pre>";
}
?>
Results in the following output:
$webpipe->manual()
This is a convenience function that returns the webpipe.json for the webpipe in question.
<?php
// Init
$webpipe = new Webpipe();
// Request the 'proxy' webpipe manual (webpipe.json)
$response = $webpipe->manual('proxy');
// Print the webpipe response
if ($response) {
print "<pre>" . $response . "</pre>";
} else {
print "<pre>Error</pre>";
}
?>
Results in the following output: