As I said in the last post, an API would be required to make the system more testable and more consistent.

I started straight away and wrote up something quickly. Over the next week, it solidified into something that appears to cover any needs that I have.

So here’s how the API works:

Requests are sent to a URL which is generated like this:

/a
[/p=plugin-name]
/f=function-name
[/other-parameters]

The plugin name is optional. Leaving it out means you want to call a core function.

Parameters can be added by adding /key=value pairs to the URL.

An example URL might be this:

/a/f=login/email=kae@verens.com

Sending that, with a POST parameter for the password, will log me in.

To log out, I can use this URL:

/a/f=logout

Simple!

Function Names

mod_rewrite is used to direct a request through a script which tears the URL apart into parameters.

If a p parameter is given, the function is named after the plugin, rewritten to match the WebME coding standard.

For example, if the URL is /a/p=comments/f=editComment, then the “comments” part is rewritten as Comments, and ‘_’ and “editComment” are appended to form the function name “Comments_editComment”, which is called and the result returned to the browser.

For double-barrel plugin names, such as “image-gallery”, the name is rewritten to “ImageGallery”.

If no p parameter is given, then the request is a core function, and “Core_” is prepended to the function name.

For example, the login URL above, /a/p=login calls the function Core_login.

If a function name begins with “admin”, it is an admin function (see below for more on this).

File names

If no plugin name is supplied, then the core API file, /ww.incs/api-funcs.php is loaded. This contained common API functions that might be used by any core script or plugin.

If a plugin name is supplied, then the API file is expected to be located at /ww.plugins/plugin-name/api.php for common functions, and /ww.plugins/plugin-name/api-admin.php for admin functions.

For core functions, common functions are at /ww.incs/api-funcs.php and admin functions are at /ww.incs/api-admin.php

Security things

Having a central point for RPC means that we can apply security rules in one place and know that they cover all scripts. Before-hand, I would sometimes come across scripts and realise that they were open for abuse if someone knows that magic URL incantation. I would silently curse myself or whoever had written the script and fix it up. Now, though, having one single point of entry means I can secure everything at once.

If a function name starts with “admin”, then the script checks to see if the user is logged in and is a member of the administrators group. If not, the API will return an error. It’s as simple as that!

Of course, this doesn’t stop abuse by people that are logged in as admins or who are victims of XSS, but it helps stop a few problems caused by developers not noticing their scripts were open to use by anyone at all.

Conclusion

So now, when people are creating new plugins for WebME, the following could be used as a bare-bones directory structure:

/ww.plugins/plugin-name/plugin.php    details, server-side functions
/ww.plugins/plugin-name/api.php       common RPC functions
/ww.plugins/plugin-name/api-admin.php admin RPC functions
/ww.plugins/plugin-name/admin.js      admin scripts in JS

I’ve been working on my CMS for about 10 years. It’s monstrously huge (41,000 lines, not including external libraries), and for most of those 10 years, I’ve been too busy building it to concentrate on niceties such as comments, testing, code formatting, etc.

This has caused problems in the past. As most programmers know, when you change any one thing, it has a ripple effect and can break things in places that don’t seem obvious at all.

Recently I’ve been remedying this. I’ve been religiously using PHPCS to make sure my code is neat and consistent, and I’ve started writing a test suite.

The most difficult part of the testing is that the CMS is composed of many separate technologies. If it was just a plain old HTML and PHP application, then PHPUnit would be enough, or maybe Selenium.

The problem is, though, that the system uses a large amount of AJAX – especially in the administration areas. No single testing system would do it all.

Another problem has to do with AJAX itself. In jQuery, you can speak to the server by writing something like this:

$.post('/a/server/script.php', {
  "id": 2
}, function(res) {
  // do stuff
}, 'json');

This makes it incredibly simple to speak to any server-side script at all on the server, and promotes it. It becomes tempting when writing new functionality to build new server-side scripts specifically for the new client-side stuff.

This has the effect that there is no single point for RPC (remote procedure calls) which can be tested, making it very difficult to be sure you have covered all potential problems.

To help solve this problem, I’ve recently started converting WebME’s coding style so all RPC is done through a single API (application programming interface) script.

This has a few extra effects which are beneficial:

• Having a single point of entry into the system makes it easier to secure it.
• Having an API promotes the construction of a solid method of adding functionality to it – there’s no need to start from scratch anymore, potentially building disparate scripts that are hard to abstract. Instead, it’s now easy to force the code to match a minimum spec.
• APIs tend to have specific rules for how parameters are passed into it, making it easier to remember what the right parameters are when writing new client-side code. Also, it makes it easier to “guess” what the right parameters are if you’ve forgotten.

The main benefit, though, is that it makes it much easier to test. The URL of the API always stays the same, and the only thing that changes is the parameters sent to the URL. Previously, each separate script would have a different URL and could have any parameter scheme at all.

So, currently, I’m writing tests that use the API directly, speaking to the server directly through URL calls. After I’ve finished writing all of those (hah! if ever), I can get on to testing that JavaScript.