Arul Kumaran, the founder and CTO of Luracast, an open source platform that offers services for web, desktop, and device application developers. Their flagship product, Restler, helps developers to build their API server in minutes. Arul has been involved with technology for the last 18 years and started off as a tech blogger in 2002.
He has been an active role player in the developer community in Singapore, where he currently resides. He has been a presenter/speaker in many events including Barcamp, Geekcamp, Workcamp, PHP User Group, Flex User Group, Flash User Group, JavaScript User Group (beermates.js), Drupal User Group, WordPress User Group, Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010 (India), Indi Flash Camp (India), and Community Leadership Summit (Korea).
In this interview, Arul sat down to talk about Restler, the flagship framework from Luracast.
Cloudways: What inspired you to create the Restler framework? What exactly did you feel was missing in existing solutions, like Phil Strugeon’s CodeIgniter Restserver?
Arul Kumaran: All frameworks those days were unnecessarily complex and primarily built for web applications. They had a big learning curve. I was a flash developer at that time, and I liked the simplicity of Flash Remoting where you can call the remote API methods return in server as if they are written in flash. I was looking for such a solution for Rest (flash remoting is done through Active Messaging Format) and came across a simple script from Jack Wright, which became the starting point for Restler!
Cloudways: How do you think Restler is making a difference for developers/programmers?
Arul Kumaran: Restler is simple to begin with and yet powerful. It transforms good PHP developers into better REST API developers and rewards their best practices with more goodness
Cloudways: One thing we find a bit unique about Restler is that it is missing the DB layer. What was your thinking behind it? Is it flexible to work with any popular DB layer?
Arul Kumaran: As per the design goal of restler, what a developer does inside the API method is his (or her) choice. Restler takes care of the rest. They are free to choose their favorite DB layer.
In order to assist them in integrating their favorite DB layer we started with the Restler wiki.
If you like Laravel’s structure and database, read here about how you can use Restler with Laravel.
Cloudways: Are you planning to add a default Audit layer for logging? And what about having hooks before and after HTTP actions?
Arul Kumaran: Feel free to integrate your preferred Audit Layer. Restler has the following events:
- onGet():Â fired before reading the request details
- onRoute():Â fired before finding the API Â method
- onNegotiate():Â fired before content negotiation
- onPreAuthFilter():Â fired before pre auth filtering
- onAuthenticate():Â fired before authentication
- onPostAuthFilter():Â fired before post auth filtering
- onValidate():Â fired before validation
- onCall():Â fired before API Â method call
- onCompose():Â fired before composing response
- onRespond():Â fired before sending response
- onComplete():Â fired after sending response
- onMessage():Â fired before composing error response
If you are using New Relic, the respective event is registered under name transaction as well!
Cloudways: Let’s take a little break from our geeky chat and tell us more about your life as an entrepreneur? How was Luracast born? What do you do beside work?
Arul Kumaran: I loved developing developer tools and utilities, and liked to share them with as many fellow developers as possible, so I made them available for free. It just started as a hobby and then became an addiction. When my job was constraining me from doing that, I resigned from my job and started Luracast. The goodwill generated by my open source and free tools helped me to be a successful freelancer and consultant.
I used to write science fiction before, now I spend my free time watching movies with my family.
Cloudways: I saw on Twitter that you speak at different events around the world. Where was your last talk and what was it all about?
Arul Kumaran: Last I spoke at FOSSASIA 2015 about the evolution and future of web applications and the impact of mobile applications in web development process.
Cloudways: How do you think Restler is different from Slim?
Arul Kumaran: Main difference compared to any other framework is the code reuse and re-purposing. Code written for Restler is more generic and less framework dependent, it is light weight as compared to slim, and more performant and object oriented.
Cloudways: Laravel is gaining a lot of popularity in the PHP arena. How do you clearly segment the use of Laravel and Restler, respectively?
Arul Kumaran: We see what developers like in Laravel and provided some integrated projects such as Laravel Database to take advantage of them in their restler projects.
Restler is an API-first framework, so it is more suited for API development.
Anyway at the end of the day it is the developer’s choice based on their preferences.
We are trying to provide one more choice where developers can choose both instead of one, more on that will be revealed later. 😉
Cloudways: What are some of the best products you have seen created using Restler?
Arul Kumaran: The list will be rather long. I have seen it to be used
- In many open source integrations.
- As backend for iOS and Android applications
- AngularJS web applications
- Web applications using Backbone, ReactJS and other javascript frameworks
Cloudways: How do you plan to take this forward in the future?
Arul Kumaran: Restler is a  product with no buoyant marketing, however it is growing organically, but slower than its potential. Improved documentation and better integration will steer it forward and accelerate its growth.
Cloudways: What are some other projects you are working on right now?
Arul Kumaran: I’m working on a startup that provides inter-office workflow as a service. I’m also working on DevOps and deployment-as-a-service solution.
Cloudways: API explorer using Swagger is really great. We liked it so much that it is installed and configured with our default deployment. So you just launch in 1-click and you get the explorer configured and already displaying documentation. We would love if you can have a look at Cloudways Restler integration and and give us your feedback as to how we can improve?
Arul Kumaran: Commercial support for open source projects is a must for its growth so I consider it as a success story for Restler!
In any open source project, the troubles one has to face before getting it to work can take away all the fun in using them.
We are glad that Cloudways is taking the initiative to help the Restler developers.
Saad Khan
Muhammad Saad Khan is a Director of Product Marketing at Cloudways (by DigitalOcean), a Growth Hacker extraordinaire, and a force to be reckoned with on the table tennis court. He's spent a decade building innovative customer-led growth strategies that helped Cloudways grow from 0 to 89,000 customers & is a regular at WordCamp events worldwide.
