At our company we have a lot of uses for a solid API. We can use it to distribute config files, have servers report in, let customers edit DNS records using their own interface, etc. Now that I'm converting all of our legacy code to a big CakePHP application, the API needed a revisit as well. I chose to use REST as a standard, read about everything related to Cake & REST, and started hacking on a reusable plugin. The idea is that you can drop it in any application and unlock existing functionality to REST with minimal changes to your code.