Creating Rest API without views using cakePHP 3.5

Cake makes this incredibly easy. A few things I have learned building without views.

Set the _serialize variable

$data = ['cheeses' => ['gouda', 'pepper jack', 'cheddar']];
$this->set('responseData', $data);
$this->set('_serialize', 'responseData');

Throw bad request exceptions and other network related exceptions

Cake will render nice json views for you.

Set your accept header when issuing and ajax request to be application/json

You can use cake prefixes for api versions

Look at Stateless Authentication for your api

In your AppController.php, with these parameters, all of your controllers will be render in json

public function beforeRender(Event $event)
{
     $this->RequestHandler->renderAs($this, 'json');
     $this->response->type('application/json');
     $this->set('_serialize', true);
}

CakePHP will render json easily.

In your Controller,look like something.

protected   $responseBody   =   [];

public function beforeRender(Event $event){

    foreach($this->responseBody as $responseKey=>$response){

       $this->set($responseKey, $response);
    }
    $this->set('_serialize', array_keys($this->responseBody));
}

public function initialize()
{
    parent::initialize();

    $this->RequestHandler->renderAs($this, 'json');
}

public function index(){

    $this->request->allowMethod(['get']);  // Method like post,get..

    $this->responseBody["statusCode"]       =   200;

    $this->responseBody["statusDescription"]        =   ''; //You send any text in json.

    $this->responseBody["data"]  =  []; // All data that you can send.

}

For further informations , You can see CakePHP Cookbook REST API to click here