The use of HTTP methods when designing and building a RESTful web service is very important.
Most developers only use the GET and POST methods offered by the HTTP specification, and for most web sites this is fine.
However, there are other useful methods in the specification that are often overlooked by web developers, but as a RESTful web service developer you will need to know. The most important of these are PUT and DELETE.
REST uses HTTP methods as a one to one mapping to the CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations you may be familiar with as a developer. These are
- Create a resource – POST
- Read a resouce – GET
- Update a resource – PUT
- Delete a resource – DELETE
There are also two other terms associated with RESTful services that you should be aware of, “safe” and “idempotent”.
A safe request is a request to read some data, not to change any server state. GET requests are safe as you should be able to GET a resource any number of times without affecting it’s state.
An idempotent request is request that however many times it is invoked, the end result is the same. GET, PUT and DELETE are all idempotent. You should be able to DELETE a resource any number of times, once deleted it’s gone, trying to delete it again won’t change the fact it’s gone.
POST is the method that causes problems, it is neither safe or idempotent. Using our CRUD example from earlier, POSTing to a server, could create duplicate resources.
For more details on other HTTP methods, such as HEAD and OPTIONS, have a look at RFC2616 – The HTTP 1.1 specification.