The Doctrine 2 REST server and client component is both an easy way to spin up REST services for your Doctrine 2 entities as well as a way to work with REST services via an ActiveRecord style implementation similiar to ActiveResource in Ruby on Rails!

The basic concept is simple, you have a REST service (http://api.people.com/person) and you want to interact with it through a simple ActiveRecord style interface.

First we can retrieve a person:

$person = Person::find(1); // GET http://api.people.com/person/1.xml

Now we can change some properties of that person:

$person->setName('Jonathan H. Wage');

Once we're done we can simply save it and the appropriate REST call will be made:

$person->save(); // POST http://api.people.com/person/1.xml (name=Jonathan H. Wage)

The REST client is an ActiveRecord style implementation for working with REST services. All you need to do is define some PHP classes that are mapped to some REST service on the web. Here is an example where we map a Person to http://api.people.com/person:

<?php

namespace Entities;

use Doctrine\REST\Client\Entity;

class Person extends Entity
{
    private $id;
    private $name;

    public static function configure(EntityConfiguration $entityConfiguration)
    {
        $entityConfiguration->setUrl('http://api.people.com');
        $entityConfiguration->setName('person');
    }

    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    public function setName($name)
    {
        $this->name = $name;
    }

    public function getName()
    {
        return $this->name;
    }
}

Now when we perform some actions it will generate the appropriate REST request, execute it, transform the response and hydrate the results to your PHP objects.

$person = new Person();
$person->setName('Jonathan H. Wage');
$person->save(); // PUT http://api.people.com/person.xml (name=Jonathan H. Wage)

We can retrieve that person again now:

$person = Person::find($person->getId()); // GET http://api.people.com/person/1.xml

Or you can retrieve all Person objects:

$persons = Person::findAll();

The Doctrine 2 REST server allows you to easily expose your entities through some REST services. This is the raw low level server and does not include any routing or URL parsing so you would need to implement in some existing framework that has routing like Symfony or Zend Framework.

All you need to do is create a new REST server instance and pass it the instance of your EntityManager you want to expose the entities for and an array representing the server request you want to process:

$request = array(
    '_method' => 'get',
    '_format' => 'xml',
    '_entity' => 'user',
    '_action' => 'get',
    '_id' => 1
);

$server = new \Doctrine\REST\Server\Server($em, $request);
$server->setEntityAlias('Entities\User', 'user');

$xml = $server->execute();

The above would retrieve the User with the id of 1 and return an XML document like the following:

<user>
    <id>1</id>
    <username>jwage</username>
</user>