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4 Verbs

Stefan Tilkov,

Bill de hÓra on HTTP methods:

I’d encourage anyone not to make the assumption that POST is the prime method and hence the most powerful, when in fact it’s merely the least meaningful (and likely hiding a design flaw around resource naming) . It’s what you use when the others don’t fit the problem. It’s not like we encourage programmers to call all their methods “execute”.

+1. Of course using GET and POST is better than using GET or POST only (I have a hard time figuring out whether the POX-style all-GET or the WS-style all-POST way is worse, BTW), but of course relying on more shared semantics and the idempotency guarantees of PUT and DELETE is even better. I would claim that having a few more (ideally idempotent) verbs would be even better (although the cost of introducing them is probably prohibitive).

On October 19, 2007 12:43 PM, Sam Ruby said:

all-POST is better than having even one non-safe operation implemented as GET.

On October 19, 2007 2:47 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Although one could argue that in the all-GET scenario, at least some “calls” add meaningful URIs to the Web …

On October 19, 2007 9:08 PM, Paul Downey said:

I’d agree with Sam, but having real issues with POST and Same Origin Policy in browsers, widgets and sites like iGoogle. In many cases injecting a script tag into the DOM is the best way to make phones rings, and that sucks.