I know REST is meant to be resource-oriented, which roughly translates to CRUD operations on these resources using standard HTTP methods. But what I just wanted to update a part of a resource?

For example, let's say I have Payment resource and I wanted to mark its status as "paid". I don't want to POST the whole Payment object through HTTP (sometimes I don't even have all the data).

What would be the RESTful way of doing this? I've seen that Twitter uses the following approach for updating Twitter statuses:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.xml?status=playing with cURL and the Twitter API

Is this approach in "the spirit" of REST?

UPDATE: PUT -> POST

Some links I found in the meantime:

• PUT or POST: The REST of the Story
• PUT is not UPDATE
• PATCH Method for HTTP