Calling a REST Server using JSON with PHP

Here is a small module to access a REST server using PHP. The module assumes that you already have services installed with a REST server working and that you've already created some nodes.

This module gets a node and prints the node and body. It's really simple and is just meant as a demo.

File: restget.module

<?php
/**
 * Implements hook_menu()
 */
function restget_menu() {
	$items['test'] = array(
		'title' => 'Test',
		'page callback' => 'restget_page',
		'access callback' => TRUE,
		'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM
	);
	
	return $items;
}

/**
 * Get the element as object
 * @param $uri the URI to get
 * @return object
 */
function _get_element() {
        // Get the node with nid 31 using JSON format.
	$uri = "http://localhost/mysite/api/rest/node/31.json";
	$response = file_get_contents($uri);

        // This will return an array, if you want an object, use json_decode($response) directly. See the comments below
	return drupal_json_decode($response);
}

/**
 * Page callback
 */
function restget_page() {
	$element = _get_element();
	
	// See the complete object with 
	// return dprint_r($element);
	
        // If you used drupal_json_decode in _get_element() you'll have an array instead of an object
	$output = '<h2>' . $element->title . '</h2>';
	$output .= '<p>' . $element->body->und[0]->value . '</p>';
	
	return $output;
}
?>

Be aware that you're not supposed to return HTML inside a function like I do in restget_page, to do that, you're supposed to create a theme function and pass the $output to that theme function, but since this is just a demo module I didn't want to over complicate