How do I perform REST queries in (cake)php?

I'm trying to pull some data into my CakePHP site using a REST API. I'm familiar with CakePHP, but not with REST, so I'd like some guidance as to the best way to do this. I've looked online, but a lot of what I find is either telling me how to make my own A开发者_StackOverflow中文版PI, or it's quite old, and I'm not sure if it's still relevant.

The API documentation tells me to make the query request

http://api.sitename.com/rest/organizations/my_id/media.xml

where my_id is a string that I have.

I'm using:

$url = http://api.sitename.com/rest/organizations/my_id/media.xml;
$result = file_get_contents($url);

and then I have the XML in $result.

Is this the best way to do this?

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Short, direct answer to:

Is this the best way to do this?

No

Head over to the PHP cURL documenation for more info on how to "talk" to public web services.

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After looking into cURL as Charles Sprayberry suggests, you'll then want to learn about parsing XML in PHP to be able to do something with the data that you retrieve.

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I found this article to be useful for understanding a bit about Cake and ReST:

http://nuts-and-bolts-of-cakephp.com/2010/06/27/putting-semi-restful-api-development-to-rest/