Are 4 Verbs Enough

Question for Mark Baker:

Suppose I have a resource which is an ordered list of other resources. What’s a suitable protocol to swap two elements around?

What happens if the list is 1,500 elements?

Can we do this with GET, PUT, POST or DELETE?

Thanks!

Update for other readers: Thanks to Mark, I learnt something new today. Stefan Tilkov had a link to HTTP PATCH RFC but that appears to be dead. There’s an expired version of the HTTP PATCH RFC over at Greenbytes.

I’m not entirely satisfied with the outcome though. If we have to extend HTTP specs, I’d rather an extension be provided so that multiple resource operations can be expressed over a single HTTP call / transaction. Server operations are always going to be hard to express, regardless of whether one uses SOAP or REST style APIs. WebDAV operations is an example. Life gets tricky, quickly.

How about specifying a minimal set of composable OPCODEs that a server can implement? This is kind of a compromise between REST and SOAP. At least then we end up with a pattern that every one can speak?

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Published:
5.17.06 / 8am
Category:
Web Services