I'm developing a Laravel 4 app that will make the same CRUD operations on my data set available through a JSON REST API and a Web UI. It seems that to prevent breaking the DRY principle that my UI should consume my own API by routing all requests from the UI back to the API. I'm unsure though about the best approach to making this work. Presumably I would have separate UI and API controllers and somehow route the requests through. Or should I be looking at a different approach altogether?
I'm actually tinkering with the same idea and it's pretty neat. With Laravel you do have the ability to make internal requests (some might refer to this as HMVC, but I won't). Here's the basics of an internal request.
$request = Request::create('/api/users/1', 'GET');
$response = Route::dispatch($request);
$response现在将包含API返回的响应.通常，这将返回一个JSON编码的字符串，这对客户端来说很好，但对于内部API请求来说并不是那么好.在这里，您需要扩展一些内容，但基本上是通过内部调用返回实际对象，对于外部请求返回格式化的JSON响应.你可以利用像$response->getOriginalContent()这样的东西来做这类事情.
您应该考虑的是构造某种内部Dispatcher，它允许您分派API请求并返回原始对象.调度程序还应处理格式错误的请求或不良响应，并抛出异常进行匹配.
这个 idea 本身是可靠的.但规划API是一项艰巨的工作.我建议你写一个很好的列表，列出所有预期的端点，起草几个API版本，然后 Select 最好的一个.