Designing CakePHP plugins for consuming APIs

Integrating data and functionality from 3rd parties into your apps is becoming increasingly common. Whether it be automatically tweeting when you create a post in your CMS, finding coordinates for places for a store locator or building your own branded video sharing site using YouTube, exploiting these services saves you and your clients time and money. And more and more clients want the same features time and again.

CakePHP plugins are the optimal way of bundling all the functionality you develop for interacting with these APIs in a single, easily distributable package, that you can share between your own applications and with other developers. Sharing with other developers is awesome. Not just because you're giving something back to the community, but they'll use it, test it, identify bugs and add new features that you yourself can use. But doing it well is not that easy.

In this talk I'll describe the approach I have gravitated to, after several iterations, that enables me to quickly develop elegant and easily sharable CakePHP plugins that consume 3rd party APIs. I'll explain how it works and why I think it's cool and I'll take you through some examples from the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bit.ly and Yahoo Geo Planet plugins I've written, demonstrating how to integrate them into your applications.