REST API - why use PUT DELETE POST GET?

Posted by Andre on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andre
Published on 2011-01-01T05:57:06Z Indexed on 2011/01/02 19:53 UTC
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So -i was looking through some articles on creating REST API's. And some of them suggest using all types of HTTP requests: like PUT DELETE POST GET. So - we would create for example index.php and write API this way:

$method = $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'];
$request = split("/", substr(@$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'], 1));

switch ($method) {
  case 'PUT':
    ....some put action.... 
    break;
  case 'POST':
    ....some post action.... 
    break;
  case 'GET':
    ....some get action.... 
    break;
  case 'DELETE':
    ....some delete action.... 
    break;
}

Ok - granted - I don't know much baout web services (yet). But - wouldn't it be easier to just accept JSON object through normal $_POST and then respond in JSON as well. We can easily serialize/deserialize via php's json_encode and json_decode and do whatever we want with that data without having to deal with different HTTP request methods...

Am I missing something?

UPDATE 1:

Ok - after digging through various API's and learning a lot about XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, SOAP, REST I came to a conclusion that this type of API is sound. Actually stack exchange is pretty much using this approach on their sites and I do think that these people know what they are doing Stack Exchange API.

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