REST - why we need million urls and different HTTP request?

Posted by Andre on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andre
Published on 2011-01-01T18:25:10Z Indexed on 2011/01/01 18:54 UTC
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I asked this question. But I still don't understand why we need to utilize different HTTP requests: DELETE/PUT/POST/GET in order to build nice API

Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to pass all information in request parameters and have a SINGLE ENTRY-POINT for your api?:

GET www.example.com/api?id=1&method=delete&returnformat=JSON
GET www.example.com/api?id=1&method=delete&returnformat=XML

or

POST www.example.com/api {post data: id=1&method=delete&returnformat=JSON}
POST www.example.com/api {post data: id=1&method=delete&returnformat=XML}

and then - we can handle all methods and data internally without the need for hundreds of urls...

how would you call this type of API - It's not REST apparently, it's not SOAP. then - what is it?

UPDATE I'm not proposing any new standards here. I merely asking a question in order to better understand why web services work the way they work.

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