simple search using restful api

Question

I'm a complete noob trying out my hands on Ajax and Jquery. By following an online tutorial, I successfully made a search engine using MySQL as the backend database;

<script>
$(function() {
$(".search_butn").click(function() {
    // getting the value that user typed
    var searchString    = $("#input_box").val();
    // forming the queryString
    var data            = 'search='+ searchString;
    // if searchString is not empty
    if(searchString) {
        // ajax call
        $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: "search.php",     //server-side script to db (mysql)
            data: data,
            beforeSend: function(html) { // this happens before actual call
                $("#results").html('');
                $("#searchresults").show();
                $(".word").html(searchString);
           },
           success: function(html){ // this happens after we get results
                $("#results").show();
                $("#results").append(html);
          }
        });
    }
    return false;
 });
});
 </script>

<form method="post" action="search.php">
<div id="DIV">
    <input type="text" name="search" id="input_box" class='input_box'/>
    <input type="submit" value="Search" class="search_butn" />
</div>
</form><br/>

<div>
 <div id="searchresults"> </div>
 <ul id="results" class="update">
 </ul>
</div>

Now I want to go a step further by searching using a RESTful api like this one from Solr http://localhost:9090/solr/select?q=employee%3A%28james+blunt%29&wt=json&indent=true I need someone to please show me how I can go about doing this.

Answer 1

To create a RESTful API, you could write some PHP code to chop down the url of the request. You should make Apache - your webserver I suppose - redirect all URLs with a certain prefix to this PHP script.

So, say a user requests http://www.somename.com/my_api/some/shiny?suffix, you want Apache to redirect this URL to the script my_api.php, such that my_api.php can chop down the entire URL and do stuff based on that. For Apache doing so, read up on apache mod_rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

For more detailed treatment of RESTful APIs, I can suggest this tutorial: http://www.restapitutorial.com/