APIPenguin

This PHP class is a handy little tool consuming data from an API and caching it. This is faster than hitting the API on every page laod and deals with API usage limits. This is specifically designed for content widgets and feeds.

Usage

To use this class, simply create a new instance and pass in an argument list. The only required argument is the api_url.

Example

require_once 'APIPenguin.class.php';

$book = new APIPenguin(array(
	'api_url' => 'https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:0747532699'
));

Your $book->data property now contains the data from your API call. If you want to print out the data for exploration you can use the print_data() method.

$book->print_data();

The following other properties can also be used in your property list.

Arguments

Arguments are entered in an associative array.

api_url required - The actual API request url
cache_dir - Defaut: cache. Location where the cache is stored
cache_file - Name of cache file. If using multiple instances, set a unique cache file name. Default is the domain name of the API call.
cache_time - Default: 3600 (hourly). Cache expiration time in seconds.
data_type - Default: json. If an XML or JSON data type isn't detected, you can manually set it
manual_recache - Default: false. You can bypass cache expiration and use the refresh_cache() with cron or something so that the no user has to wait for the API to be hit again.

Default values:

'cache_dir' => 'cache',
'cache_time' => '3600',

Methods

print_data() - Simply does a print_r with pre tags. Usefull for exploring your data object.
refresh_cache() - Manually expire the cache and update it with fresh data from the API.

Data Types

The class supports XML and JSON, and will try to identify which has been returned, but sometimes you may need to set that manually using the data_type argument.

Caching

The data returned from the API call is cached in a cache directory (you don't need to create it yourself). If your cache folder isn't created automatically you'll need to create it manually and make it writable.

The default is that the cache lasts for an hour. If you need to you can set the cache_time property to something more frequent.