Black Sheep Research Plugin for Rest in Joomla

This plugin enables the handling of restful style requests in Joomla. One or more additional plugins must be deployed to implement specific services. The service plugins must be in the folder restful, and provide details of the URIs and calls to be handled in response to the onRestfulPaths trigger. An  example is:

    public function onRestfulPaths($context, &$paths) {
        if ('plg_system_restful' == $context) {
            $paths['/myrestful/myaction'] = array('POST' => array($this, 'myaction'));
            $paths['/myrestful/test'] = array('GET' => array($this, 'test'));
        }
    }
 
The way this works is that if, for example, a POST request is made to https://example.com/myrestful/myaction then the callable array($this, 'myaction') is invoked. This means that the service plugin must have a method called myaction. The call does not have to be to the service plugin, it can be to anywhere that the service plugin can construct a callable for. Anything that is a valid PHP callable can be used here.
 
 So the service plugin might implement a method:

      public function myaction($uri, $restful) {
        echo "The URI $uri resulted in myaction being called";
        // Do something
    }

The $uri in this case will contain "/myrestful/myaction". The instance of this plugin is passed as the second parameter, $restful. It can be used to call the helpful methods shown here:
 
 authenticateUser($username, $password)
 authenticateUserAndGroup($username, $password, $groups)
 getHeaderUserPass()
 respondAndExit($response_object, $response_code, $response_message)
 

The first two of these return true or false. The third will return an array with two elements - username and password - provided a valid Basic Authorization header is received. The fourth accepts an arbitrary object that is converted to JSON and returned as the HTTP response, along with a result header based on the provided response code and message.

 Note that for getHeaderUserPass to work, an HTTP Basic Authorization header  must be supplied by the caller. Basic Authorization must be used only with  SSL as otherwise username and password are being passed insecurely.

You can find the plugin here. You can also download an example (it doesn't do anything useful but demonstrates how to implement a service) here.