Submitted by blaine on

Drupal 8 will have web services as part of core which will provide native support for all entity types including custom entity types. Drupal 8 will have support for different serialization formats like HAL+JSON, XML and JSON.

A couple of good article references:

Additionally, Drupal 8 has adopted the Guzzle library to replace the drupal_http_request() function which provides a feature rich HTTP Client. I was looking for a simple standalone script to test using Guzzle to read a node from D8 using the RESTful endpoint and get a hal+json format resonse.

<?php 
/* Script located in the docroot for your Drupal 8 site */ 

use Drupal\Core\DrupalKernel; 
use Drupal\Core\Site\Settings; 
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request; 

$autoloader = require_once __DIR__ . '/core/vendor/autoload.php'; 
use GuzzleHttp\Client; 
$client = new Client(); 
echo '<h1>RESTful request to get a json response for node 1</h1>'; 
$request = $client->createRequest('GET', 'http://localhost/d8test2/node/1'); 

// Set the Accept header for the D8 JSON representation 
$request->setHeader('Accept', 'application/hal+json'); 
$response = $client->send($request); $json = $response->json(); 
echo '<pre>' . var_dump($json) . '</pre><hr>'; 

// Now display just the node body value 
echo '<h1>Node 1 body value</h1>'; 
print $json['body'][0]['value']; 
echo '<h1>Retrieve the complete site</h1>'; 
$response = $client->get('http://localhost/d8test2/node/1'); 
$body = $response->getBody(); 

// By default if the response is large, Guzzle will save the body in a temp file 
while (!$body->eof()) { 
  echo $body->read(1024); 
}

Link to gist on github: https://gist.github.com/blainelang/46353455dbaf53499c58

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