Introduction

laminas-json-server is a JSON-RPC server implementation. It supports both the JSON-RPC version 1 specification as well as the version 2 specification; additionally, it provides a PHP implementation of the Service Mapping Description (SMD) specification for providing service metadata to service consumers.

JSON-RPC is a lightweight Remote Procedure Call protocol that utilizes JSON for its messaging envelopes. This JSON-RPC implementation follows PHP's SoapServer API. This means, in a typical situation, you will simply:

  • Instantiate the server object.
  • Attach one or more functions and/or classes/objects to the server object.
  • handle() the request.

laminas-json-server utilizes Laminas\Server\Reflection to perform reflection on any attached classes or functions, and uses that information to build both the SMD and enforce method call signatures. As such, it is imperative that any attached functions and/or class methods have full PHP docblocks documenting, minimally:

  • All parameters and their expected variable types
  • The return value variable type

laminas-json-server listens for POST requests only at this time; fortunately, most JSON-RPC client implementations in the wild at the time of this writing will only POST requests as it is. This makes it simple to utilize the same server end point to both handle requests as well as to deliver the service SMD, as is shown in the next example.