How to hide the .php extension in your URLs

Sometime you could implement web components that expose public REST-ful interfaces implemented in PHP. In those cases it may be useful to expose end points that are technology-agnostic. 

So, for example, instead of http://example.com/handler.php?param1=val1&param2=val2 you'd have http://example.com/handler?param1=val1&param2=val. Thus, you could later on decide to switch the underlying technology to something like servlets and reuse the old format for the URLs.

An easy way to accomplish this is using Apache's ability to do URL rewriting. Simply edit the .htaccess file in the root folder of your web directory and place the following directives:

RewriteEngine on 

RewriteRule handler handler.php