Apigility Workshop

Some technical difficulties, but I've been there, so no sweat. For exercise 2, I recommend providing the code for the mapper, as the data access layer is really a separate problem to solve from creating the REST API. The hydration and controller logic are really the important things to take away. The Mapper layer and ServiceManager stuff was distracting and complicated, especially for someone not familiar at all with ZF2.

This might be personal preference, but when I participate in workshops, I don't mind having the instructor walk through the work and copy as he or she goes along. I feel that there was too much responsibility on us to find solutions on our own in silence, which distracted from the real take-aways from the presentation. When I watch tutorials, I expect to watch and mimic the presenter step-by-step.

The project setup was a little complicated, but the README was outstanding and most everyone didn't have a problem. Nice exposure to Vagrant, Chef, and Phing for those who haven't used them before. I transferred over after my 1st choice tutorial was cancelled, so I didn't have time to prepare, but I was up and running in 15 minutes.

Good job on the presentation, I can tell you guys have a passion for APIs. I definitely learned a couple best-practices along the way. (I'll be talking to our lead designer about versions in our URIs...) I also LOVED that you told me to submit a pull request after suggesting improvements. :D

There were a few technical issues and live coding issues, but it was good. I've been building APIs w/ Apigility since the day it was announced, but I use Zend\Db\Sql instead of TableGateway. It was cool to see what can be done using that wrapper. There's a ton of stuff to cover in a pretty short amount of time but it seemed that we may have made it a bit further in the examples (and example 4 would have been one of the cooler parts) with a bit more leading. Apigility does start to make a lot of sense after using it for a bit but if the audience is not familiar with ZF2 or even with Apigility before this talk, it may take a bit more for granted than it should. Thanks for the tutorial and for creating Apigility.

Matthew and Julien worked very well together to provide a great introduction to Apigility for those who hadn't previously been exposed to it. Unfortunately the time slot was far too small to cover everything so I left feeling that they had covered the easy bits but, like nearly every presentation I've seen on Apigility, skimmed over the authentication and authorization pieces. The Vagrant setup bundled with the example code was very complicated and overkill for this purpose; a simple LAMP stack from PuPHPet would have sufficed and may have increased the success rate for attendees getting the code running. The example app could be run using a local PHP install and SQLite so I think most were still able to play along. Despite the few hiccups it was a great introduction to Apigility and a very convincing sales pitch on why you should use it.